Catherine Wagner. Going Deeper

No matter the subject, Catherine Wagner’s photographs penetrate inner depths. In her work, seeing is both sensation and a philosophical act. “I’m always trying to get at the essence . . . the very core of what I’m looking at,” describes the artist. “I’m always trying to move to that internal structure.”¹ Structures, then, can be depicted in the cement foundations of a building, family photographs arranged on a living room wall, student desks in a classroom, and the surface of a shark’s tooth. However, as art critic Bill Berkson wrote of her photographs, “the subjects have a reflexive pitch, as if Wagner’s eye and her camera had set out to rediscover their own intentions,”² so that despite the everyday character of the subjects themselves, Wagner’s photographs probe an unfamiliar interior—an unseen world.