Located in midtown Manhattan, LIM College educates students in the business of fashion and provides internships and job opportunities through its undergraduate and graduate programs.  The college wanted to build a library of images for use in its recruitment programs.  Working with an art director and a crew of one, we shot hundreds of images over several days, featuring New York City as our backdrop.

LIM wanted the images to reflect the energy and synergy that studying the business of fashion in New York City provides.  All of the individuals photographed are actual LIM students and alumini.  Most are photographed in Manhattan; a few, fashion entrepreneurs, are photographed at their own ateliers.

Over the next weeks, I’ll be posting more of the images from “Young in New York” on social media. 

Ah, to be young in New York…

The At Home section of this website features some of my favorite architecture and interior design images.   I will soon be adding images from a recent Buffalo Spree assignment to that section.  It was challenging to capture the warmth and intimacy of this dark and moody den.  The greenery outside the windows added an important connection to nature that I wanted to be sure to include along with the richly detailed interior space.

View our At Home Gallery

On assignment for Buffalo Spree Magazine in 2012, I photographed Ted Lownie, principal architect for the restoration of the Darwin Martin House Complex.  In 2020-21, I started shooting the Jun Kaneko/Albright-Knox Public Art Exhibit on the grounds of the complex. Based on my conversations with Ted during the portrait shoot,  I like to think he would have approved the integration of art, architecture, and design that is the Space Between.

American Stories was a collection of portraits created in 2004 during the Bush/Kerry presidential election. Reimagined as black and white images, the portraits are a powerful reminder that each of us has a voice in creating the American story.

This image is my favorite from a recent evening stroll through the Jun Kaneko installation at The Martin House in Buffalo, NY.   It is not the most colorful or the most dramatic but it is the one that most reminds me of the gardens I visited in Kyoto, Japan.  There is a solitude, and a unity between man and nature, that so typifies the Japanese aesthetic for me.

In an environmental portrait, the location illuminates the subject's personality and illustrates a place where he spends much of his time.  I recently photographed James Hickey, artist, sculptor, and hairstylist through the window of his Hertel Avenue salon.  Hickey's own painting on the back wall, the open blade of his casually cocked razor, and the bokeh from the evening street lights all inform this image of a highly creative, edgy and intense human.

I've always loved galvinized steel and have been a collector for years.  But it was not my first choice for a background when I decided to photograph a still life of araucana and browm eggs.  I originally posted the image on IG (kc kratt) in color, but I decided to post it here as a black and white.  There is an incredible tactile quality in this treatment which emphasizes the texture and sparkle of the galvinized as well as the luminous sheen of the eggs.  

Players gotta play and photographers gotta shoot—anything and everything they see.  It makes for a diverse body of work and occasionally that leads to unusual and fun assignments.  We recently completed a project for The Martin Group and Under Armour, #sweetcatch.  The client wanted to photograph a new line of specialty baseball gloves with fabulous, colorful desserts.  Working with the agency and local pastry chef, Lucy Levere, we created an eye catching — and mouthwatering — campaign.