Past Fellow

Kaitlin Jencso

Biography

Kaitlin Jencso is a photographer who lives and works in Washington, D.C. Jencso explores the emotional terrain of ever-expanding and evolving relationships through loss, ephemera, bloodlines, and the land. Her photographs of the habitual moments in our everyday capture and communicate insular experiences. Kaitlin graduated with a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2012. She won Best Fine Art Series at FotoWeek DC in both 2014 and 2016 and received the Award of Merit in the 2014 Focal Point show at the Maryland Federation of Art.

Artist statement

Disenchanted grew out of the need to mediate the painful experience of death within my family. It is primarily composed of candid images in the diaristic tradition of my immediate family as we dealt with the prolonged process of death and its aftermath. We grieved the physical loss of these two people, as well as the emotional fallout and degradation of familial bonds that rippled out into the surviving family. There is never explicit imagery of their deaths, or even the people themselves, but the overall tone and melancholy of loss that seeped out into all aspects of life over the years is acutely depicted. The people shown in the images are rarely looking at the camera, but are instead presented through an intimate, yet voyeuristic lens as they go about their every day existence. Stretches of time are distilled in small, transcendent experiences that portray the underlying sorrow, beauty, and mundanity of remaining.

Press

Bmore Art, May 9, 2019

The Washington Post, May 3, 2019

East City Art, April 9, 2019

Brightest Young Things, April 4, 2019