Leica is delighted to welcome Cat Garcia as an official Leica Ambassador, representing the company’s iconic M rangefinder camera system.
Leica Ambassadors are gifted photographers and influencers, selected to work exclusively with the company and its products to showcase their talent, expertise and creativity inspiring other photographers to discover and experience the uniqueness of the brand, and explore the distinctive world of Leica photography.
Furthermore, Leica is pleased to support Cat’s brand new personal project, ‘Quarterly‘, where Cat will capture a series of portraits of individuals whose occupation or lifestyle relates to the seasons. This fascinating new work will be exhibited later in 2017 at Leica in Mayfair, London.
For more info on Quarterly, here is an outline:
Cat Garcia is shooting an ongoing series of personal work entitled Quarterly. Capturing quietly observed details across the seasons – of nature, and portraits of people close to it.
The below gives an introduction to the series – words by Anthony Leyton.
Every year, the world withers and begins anew. The seasons weave into one another, as sure and imperceptible in their cycle as the hour hand on a clock face. The leaves turn and fall; icicles cluster on park railings while crocuses wait, green beneath the soil, for their moment in the sun.
These are the broadest brush strokes of change. They are what those of us lucky enough to live at a four-season latitude see year after year.
The cycle of the seasons does more than change the scenery. It is not just a team of stagehands slipping into the shadows of a four-act play to replenish the flowers and rearrange the furniture. The effects are slow, uninterruptible and they touch upon everything: the colours of the world, the qualities of light and shadow, your mood in the morning, the clothes you put on, what you do with your day. We might not realise it at the time (despite the fact it has likely happened at that time for every year of our lives) but we silently recalibrate our habits, hopes and expectations on the emergence of the first daffodil.
The gradual nature of this transition is what makes our seasons so precious. The glories of high summer’s day spent with friends loafing in a park or taking a country bike ride are so much more pleasurable – so much easier to cherish – because they’re so fleeting. Likewise winter, with all its fragile beauty and cosiness, earns its wonder in its ending.
Cat Garcia is following the rhythms of a year with her camera, observing the way it affects the smallest details of life in the UK – in our cities, in our countryside and in our behaviour. This series traces the flow of the seasons as they are lived, offering glimpses of people and places as they are affected by the possibilities promised by spring, summer, autumn and winter; lives and landscapes inexorably changing from season to season, quarter to quarter…
These images pay homage to the fact that the idea of ‘quarterly’ suggests more than the dates on a calendar, but refers to the wonderful metamorphosis of the world each year – both outside our doors and inside our heads.
The image shown here is shot with Summicron-M 50mm f/2.