Born in Germany in 1972, Catherine Adams is a photographer, writer, and traveler.  In-between acquiring a master’s degree in art history and pursuing Ph.D. studies (University of Iowa, USA), Catherine spent a year traveling through the entirety of India researching sari production, interviewing weavers, and then cataloging pieces in the national handlooms museum.  This ignited a passion for exploring the ways cultures and people meet the needs of today and negotiate their pasts.  Leaving behind the academic path of an art historian in 2005, she has built a successful manuscript editing and print design business (Inkslinger Editing) helping artists and writers craft and present the written word.  Since 2005, she has exhibited photography in group and solo shows in the Midwest and along the East Coast. Since 2011, she has been represented by Joy Reed Belt (JRB Art at the Elms) in Oklahoma City.  Her work has appeared in Black and White Photography Magazine, InDigest, & F-Stop Photographic Magazine.  In July 2018, the solo exhibit “Havana, Cuba: Acute Charm of Ruin and Development” will be mounted in Oklahoma City. This will be followed in 2019 with a solo exhibit of the first installment of her current project “On the Route to Ruins: From Baalbek to Bukhara.”

Having lived in widely different places around the world, including Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, and New Delhi, she now seeks the nomadic life as she pursues questions of civilization, ruins, aesthetics, and national identity through both photography and writing.  In the opening of 2018, she inaugurated a Peregrination Project, an exploration of places and communities lesser known or understood within the U.S. for historical, religious, or political reasons, such as Lebanon in Middle East or the once-Soviet bloc countries in Eurasia and Central Asia.  Traveling solo for months at a time, she examines communities and nations in the process of shaping their narratives and visual identities as they transition out of war, old overlords, and corruption.  Out of these experiences come imagery that are part documentary of contemporary life, part lyric meditation on civilization, and part light-paintings of awe. In the summer of 2018, she will return first to the mountains of Georgia with a Georgian political activist to document the shifting border with Russia, then head to the mountain teashops of Azerbaijan that recall her childhood in central Kentucky, initiating a meditation on the meaning of family rituals and retreats in two rural communities halfway around the world from one another.  In the opening months of 2019, she will travel solo once more in the Middle East and Central Asia.