Jan Watten

Artist Statement:

I am a photographer who still shoots film and prints in my darkroom. I'm interested in investigating identity and am currently working on a series of portraits of youth culture. I'm also working with an alternative camera taking photographs of plant life in my series "Botanicals".  

I've been making photographs for over 25 years, showing my work locally and internationally.

Photographer Jan Watten has a passion for expressing the essence and core of her subject's being. This vision of purity and simplicity was nurtured during her youth. Her work revolves around the idea of identity and she focuses on capturing an aspect or an isolated moment of her subjects. 

She is also experimenting with an alternative low-tech camera, with which she is working on a study of nature images.

Watten has a degree from California College of the Arts, and has been making photographs for over 25 years, and still uses film that she processes in her Oakland studio.  She has shown domestically and internationally, and was recently profiled in Black and White Magazine.