Poetic portraits by Polish photographer Kate Katies

Everyday is a new day and has its own opportunities which in many cases are unique. So patience, calm and assertiveness are skills that I have developed with the frequency of love and understanding to people around me.

My Name is Kate, I'm from Poland, yet I've been based in London for a few years now.

It’s here in London where I have found the key ingredient in my creativity. I'm grateful for how life has been in the last few years. Challenges and difficulties have made me look at my surroundings from a different perspective. At the beginning as a scape, yet with the time it has become a way to explore my emotions, connection with others and how the world moves around me. I’m a keen Yogi, and that also has an influence as it helped me to be more flexible, not only physically but at heart.

At the beginning I started just using a mobile phone camera as I couldn’t afford anything else and wasn’t sure of where photography was going to take me. Nowadays, I still work with my IPhone 13 Pro and a Fuji x-e4 which I really like as it’s a small frame and easy to carry and shoot without much time to prepare.

I started with street geometry, which I think is a must as it really gives you the school for perspective but not often tells a story, it’s the interaction that people have with their environment, nature, structures, and themselves what really sparks my creativity on my daily commute, walks, etc… Lately I’m focusing on portrait in the studio which throws a technical challenge, but anything and anyone under any circumstance could be my next shot.

Creativity is about having the freedom to do whatever I want, is good to have an influence at some point from other photographers but following other people’s work just keeps you in a static frame, experimentation has been in so many ways the key to finding my own style. Pleasing others might give you straight recognition but doesn’t mean good work, in fact, it could turn out to be the worst of your work.