Botanical Gluttony | Featured Photographer Kari Herer

Dark studio botanical no. 3
Credit: Kari Herer What’s your connection to New England? After spending most of my life on the West Coast, where I attended art school, I received an offer from UMass Dartmouth to do a yearlong residency. It’s 15 years later, and I have never looked back. I absolutely fell in love with life in this part of the country. Both my daughters were born in Maine, and when my oldest began kindergarten, I decided to settle down in Yarmouth, where I still live today. Nothing makes us happier than hitting up the local doughnut shops before heading out to the beach, where we spend the morning looking for starfish on Sandy Point. Describe your background in photography. My formal background is in studio art, but after my daughter was born I found myself fascinated with images of flowers. At that point, I was living in a house that had an extensive peony garden, and one morning I randomly began placing flowers on old woodcuts of insects. I was transfixed by the way the shape of the flowers resembled that of the bugs, and it inspired me to delve deeper. This led to a more formal education in photography at Maine Media Workshops, where I have gone on to teach classes. What inspires you? My mother was a fantastic illustrator, which meant that I grew up with various species of animals all around the house. I was inspired by everything in my surroundings, from the ducks we raised to the monarch butterflies that I would observe emerging from they chrysalises — often right under our kitchen table! My father, a seventh-grade science teacher, kept hissing cockroaches in cages down in our basement, where he also pursued one of his many hobbies, taxidermy. The combination of all these things led to a fascination with the cycle of life and death at a very early age. The births of my daughters have taken this even one step further. To see more of Kari Herer’s work, go to kariherer.com or find it on Instagram @botanicalgluttony.

Botanical Gluttony | Featured Photographer Kari Herer