Member Profile: Karen Smul

close In many of my photographs, my intent is to capture the genuine relationships between people in our community in a real and expressive way. Many of my photographs are from my work with non-profit organizations based in New York City. Photography has granted me access to beautiful faces and interesting places in the City that I would never have discovered on my own. I have participated in a Chinese New Year celebration with mostly Asian children at a settlement house on the Lower East Side, documented ballroom dances in the senior center of a housing project on Allen Street, and captured dynamic learning experiences at public schools in Chinatown and near Yankee Stadium. When photographing these sometimes exotic worlds within our own community, I am often amazed by the strong connections I make with the people in these images in the short time it takes to shoot a couple of frames. Unlike those of us who are concerned about how we look in photographs, I found that many of these subjects welcomed the limelight — in lives that can be difficult or full of hardships, they enjoyed both the attention and the connection that comes with the focus of a camera.