Karen Safer
Artist Bio
Karen Safer is a photographic artist, writer, and poet with a musical bent who lives at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. As a native Angelino, she was given a camera and crayons at 3 and exposed to dominant California motifs: light, palm trees, the ocean, music, and vernacular architecture that helped define and influence her left-handed aesthetic. She was influenced by her dad (amateur calligrapher and photographer) who developed black & white photos in their back washroom/turned darkroom and by her mother's love of history, language, and thirst for knowledge and travel.
Early on, she was greatly influenced by movies, music, books, plays, history, and art from the ancient Babylonians to Vermeer to Atget and Cindy Sherman. She has a master's degree in art, and a career in design and architecture, exhibited in 12 solo shows, 300+ international galleries, museums, and magazines including London, Rome, Glasgow, Budapest, Athens, Prague, Paris, Barcelona, Sao Paulo and from California to New York, winning 240+ Talent, Merit and Honorable Mention Awards and represented in private collections. She is a self-described “romantic soul” with intellectual cravings and a lover of Jazz, Rock & Roll (the background soundtrack of her youth), basketball, and baseball.
She is listed in Who’s Who of Professional Women 2023 and honored with First Prizes for ABSTRACT and ARCHITECTURE photography in the 21st Julia Margaret Cameron Award, Black and White Spider Awards, and in LA ART SHOW 2024.
She was fortunate to begin a life of travel as a pre-teen that shaped her love of the exotic, paired with an eye for the formal, accidental, and "unusual" while subliminally seeking the beauty that jiggled the lens/frame of her eye. She has experienced and photographed in over 230 countries/territories of the earth.
"A photographer has the whole world big or small to capture." - kjs