About
There’s a moment about an hour into most shoots when the designer stops hovering. She quits apologizing for the sofa cushion that won’t behave and the strange thing the afternoon light is doing in the hallway, and she just sits down in the room she built. That’s usually when I get the picture.
I’m Kate Williams. I photograph interiors, architecture, gardens, and hospitality spaces for design firms, architects, landscape designers, and editorial clients. I’m based in Santa Cruz and I shoot across the Monterey Bay, Silicon Valley, and the San Francisco Bay Area, with regular work in Los Angeles and abroad.
Before photography, I taught high school English for six years. Honors and inclusion, back-to-back, same day. Teenagers are a merciless audience and they taught me the only thing I really know how to do: find the narrative running underneath what a thing is presenting on the surface. A room is doing that constantly. The books somebody actually reads versus the ones staged on the shelf. The rug worn thin at the doorway. The window the whole house was clearly designed around. My job is to notice, and then to build a frame that makes you notice too.
Most of my ongoing work comes from two overlapping circles: interior designers and artists. Which is really one circle. The designer sources the painting, the painter needs her studio documented, and both of them are in the business of making a person feel something about an object in a room. I like being trusted by both sides of that. It also means I’m comfortable putting a human being in the frame. A lot of architectural photographers clear the room before they shoot, and there are good reasons for it, but I’d usually rather leave the maker standing in her own mess.
I shoot in natural light almost always, and I shoot a full arc of the day when the project allows it, because a north-facing room at 9am and the same room at 6pm are not the same room. I style. Most architectural photographers won’t touch your furniture, and I understand why, but I’ve never once regretted moving a chair four inches.
What I’m after is a particular emotional frequency. Faraway, warm, slightly nostalgic. The feeling of looking at a photograph of a place you’ve never been and thinking it looks like a memory of your own.
I believe nothing should be ugly. Not the house, not the garden, not the photograph of either. Life goes by fast enough without settling for the version of it that came off a shelf.
I also spent a stint as a photo editor at Lonny, the shelter magazine, which is a strange and enormously useful thing to have done. You sit at a desk and look at thousands of images from very good photographers, and you kill nearly all of them. You learn quickly which pictures survive a printed page and which ones only ever work at full screen on the photographer’s own website. I shoot now with that desk in the back of my head. If you’re submitting a project for press, that is the difference between a maybe and a feature.
Locally, I’ve photographed for K&D Landscaping, the design-build firm responsible for a good portion of the high-end residential and commercial landscape in this county, and for Redtree Partners, a commercial developer working in downtown Santa Cruz and beyond. Which is to say I’ve spent a great deal of time photographing this particular coast, in both the pretty version and the version with scaffolding on it. I know what the fog does in Aptos in June, and I know the two weeks in September when the light on the Monterey Peninsula is worth rearranging a whole schedule for.
