We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kitty Stolzenbach a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kitty, thanks for joining us today. Do you take vacations? Why or why not?

Every vacation is an opportunity to create more images. I am not a “beach” person, so I usually go to big cities for vacation with shooting in mind. It’s important to relax and rest, but for me, that means walking through city streets and taking lots of photos. These photos are usually for myself and not for a client, so I can shoot the way I want to shoot.

Kitty, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Photography started as a hobby when I was about five or six. My mother bought me a Kodak Instamatic camera for my birthday. I’ve been shooting ever since. I’ve been a mobile photographer for 13 years. I shoot with my iPhone only. For a few years, I worked as a social media photographer for other people, but now I sell my own photos. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I owned a gallery in Silver City, New Mexico, and sold my photos of the town to tourists. I still sell photo greeting cards in one of the local shops. Creating unique photos of popular or touristy places is a great way to break into a market.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I spent nearly ten years in a tiny town in the southwest corner of New Mexico. I wasn’t entirely sure what I would do there, but was lucky enough to get the attention of the director of the local tourism organization. She attended one of my “Instameets,” where attendees were given a treasure hunt-type list of photos to shoot. We met up an hour later at a local brewery and the person who finished the list in full received a free entree. She offered me a job the next day. A couple of years later, the town decided to shut down our organization, and I was unemployed. Luckily, I had made quite a few connections and one to the local gallery owners invited me to partner with her. I did all of the marketing and she handled the financial side of the business. With the two of us, she was finally able to have an actual weekend for herself and keep the gallery open seven days a week. I was able to keep a couple of side gigs and sell my photos, which is something I hadn’t really done before. We were very successful, and the business was growing every month—until COVID-19 took us down. We closed the gallery, but one of my side gigs was doing social media for a local Montessori school, and with their PPE loans, I was able to work full time throughout the lockdown. The moral of the story is to not limit yourself to one project. You never know when that source of income may dry up.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist to me is just that: art. I’ve worked in different fields and worn a lot of different hats throughout my career, but my art is the only thing that gives me any satisfaction. The only time I feel truly in the moment and content on all levels is when I’m shooting. The rest of the world melts away, and it’s just me and the camera. Nothing else matters in those moments. I don’t know what I would do without that.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: this.kitty

Image Credits
this kitty photography