Kate Beale

I started taking pictures in 5th grade with my father’s old Leica but quickly set my sights on a Canon AE-1, which I bought with the proceeds of a short but lucrative career babysitting any child whose parents were desperate enough to leave an infant in my care. A couple years later, my mother and I built a darkroom in our basement, where I happily spent much of my angst-ridden teenage years.

For the past 30 years, I've called San Francisco home. It's a rare urban environment, equally fraught with societal ills and rich with incredible natural beauty. It's an ideal location for any photographer, especially one who believes, as I do, that cityscapes can be as dramatic and epic in light and and subject matter as landscapes and seascapes. My day job as a web content strategist pays the bills, but I am happiest out exploring with camera in hand. 

Since 2018, I've been a member of The Burning Man Project's Documentation Team, photographing events throughout the year, including the annual collective effort to build Black Rock City—a temporary 80,000-person city in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, an environment as forbidding as it is breathtakingly beautiful.