Alexa Stroth

Ms. Stroth is a photographer who I discovered in a roundabout way. When I was in high school, I belonged (loosely) to an online group of like-aged people who made their own websites about various topics of interest (usually tv shows, anime, or other series of fan-related significance). I never actually knew Alexa Stroth personally, but used to frequent her websites because she tended to approach her website design in creative ways. She also posted some of her photography, that I became captivated with as well. After a period of time, she only posted photographs, but I was inspired all the same.

Fast forward many years, and Alexa Stroth is still a photographer – and I’m still keeping up with her work. As you can probably guess, it isn’t the same as it was eight or nine years ago.

From keeping up with some of her postings on Livejournal, I was able to get an idea of her technique then. She used to shoot a particular (now extinct) color film in a traditional 35mm camera to give especially warm, bright photographs of plants and other interesting environmental details. One particular photograph I can remember was a simple shot of some kind of grain field in autumn, but the high saturation and warm tone of the gold grain and the afternoon sky was particularly stunning together. I remember a series that included the deep greens and browns of wet leaf prints and fungi on cement, and the flashing crimson of autumn leaves against a backdrop of an out of focus city. I loved her attention to detail, color, and use of shallow depth of field to create an impressionistic environment.

Now her work is “all grown up,” so to speak, and although she still maintains an eye for the peculiar and a sense of capturing an environment, her work is more subtle. Photographic series, especially of humorously out-of-place, awkward, or mismatched objects, are her focus. For example, she has captured a whole set of photographs of slow-to-melt piles of snow around Vancouver, Canada.

She was the first person whose creative work inspired me to create for myself. And if it wasn’t for her photographs, I might not have ever become interested in photography. You can see some of her photos on her website at kitchenquiet.net.