ABOUT KATE BALLIS
Australian photographer Kate Ballis was a former media and entertainment lawyer who felt for photography. She defines herself as an aestheticist with a love for light, color, and the beauty of darkness and shadows.
Her work has an essential fine art, yet editorial and commercial component with a focus on landscapes.
Instead of wearing a suit for work, Kate now experiments with patterns and textures found within the natural world, one of her preferred subjects, to create images that appear ethereal.
“I’m constantly planning the next destination to photograph and finding ways to capture that place’s story in a way that feels as unexplored as the location itself.”, she states on her website’s bio.
INFRA-RED TECHNIQUE
Kate Ballis has toured with an infrared camera – a new digital Sony device she converted into a full-spectrum camera – and with the use of colored filters, Ballis will produce images which show the chosen subject in purple, pink and red tones. The result is a set of surreal images that recreate a completely different palette to standard expectations.
It took her few days to reach the aesthetic she was looking for, days in which she experimented and played with filters and different techniques. She finally proudly ended up saying: “The colors I settled for the series allowed me to question reality and create ambiguity in everyday scenes.”
INFRAREALISM SERIES
Kate got to create the Infra Realism series while photographing Palm Spring’s Mars-like deserts, Mid-century houses, and luxury vintage cars. Soon though, she felt this was a general vision and decided to switch to a unique angle. “I sought to ree-enchant the city and its surrounding landscapes through some other medium, extending the edge of the visible spectrum exponentially (…)”.
Though, Kate went further, converting the ordinary palette related to palm Spring into an unexpected, the unusual purplish.
“What makes the INFRA REALISM series unique to me is how many ways there are of looking at it. To some, the palette is representative of 1980s Americana – of pink Barbie dolls driving blue Mustangs, MTV, Miami’s neon signs. As a child of the era, I certainly can’t escape my penchant for these hyper-realistic worlds that I looked at with awe in my youth in far-off Australia. And then there’s something spiritual about the work, too, in that it makes the unseen visible. I am interested in energy and how it can make us feel, affect our mood, and through this mode of photography, I can help make that more visible. That, to me, is the most exciting combination of science and magic.”
Go here to view more of Ballis’s works.
