Kim Kirkpatrick (born 1952) is a landscape photographer who lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area.
Kirkpatrick earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Maryland. In 1993, the Aaron Siskind Foundation awarded Kirkpatrick an Individual Photographers Fellowship Grant.[1] Kirkpatrick taught photography as an adjunct member of the faculty at the Corcoran College of Art and Design[2] and at the Smithsonian Residents Associate Program. He has exhibited his photography in galleries and museums. The musical group Interface used a Kirkpatrick photograph on the cover of their CD "./swank." [3]
Kirkpatrick’s landscape photos focus on construction and industrial zones around Washington D.C. As Kirkpatrick said in a 2001 interview, "I take pictures where nature and man meet, where one is taking over the other". He uses an 8×10 view camera because, Kirkpatrick said, its high-resolution image, "never falls apart, even when you get closer," adding, "I want the detail that people miss."[4] Sally Troyer, a D.C. gallery owner, said of Kirkpatrick’s work, “I have never seen work so sensitive to light and color."[5] Kirkpatrick created a large body of work in five to six years during the 1980s and 1990s that extensively used the photo effect, bokeh (the effect of light in out-of-focus areas of a photograph). Mike Johnston noted, in reference to bokeh, that Kirkpatrick "made deft use of it as design, as figuration, and as a way to use color abstractly".[6] Mike Johnston further wrote that Kirkpatrick is "the American master of bokeh-aji " and selected Kirkpatrick as one of the 10 best living U.S. photographers. Kirkpatrick once worked as a postman, and also as a disc jockey on Washington D.C. radio stations including WHFS and WAMU. He continues to write and publish music reviews on a blog that he co-directs.