THE HOURGLASS

The fine-art photographer Katherine Wolkoff admires deeply the work of Walker Evans and William Eggleston, but it is fiction rather than visual art that she cites as her greatest influence, specifically the novels of Flannery O’Connor. “More than anything, as a kid, I read all the time,” Wolkoff says. “Fiction informed the way that I think about things. It’s an imaginary way of thinking about things. When I’m photographing, I’m looking at something that is known, but I’m looking at it in a different way.”

 Look at enough of Wolkoff’s photographs and you will start to see it: an O’Connoresque sense of mystery is present throughout her work, which has been exhibited at Sasha Wolf Gallery, Danziger Projects, and the New York Photo Festival, and published in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. Her enchanting 2007 series, “Deer Beds,” captures the abandoned temporary nests that deer make in grassy meadows. In a more recent series, “Bonsai,” Wolkoff creates silhouettes of bonsai trees, but so abstractly that the images become disorienting. “What interests me so much about bonsai when I photograph them is the scale change,” she says. “There is a little bit of an unknown. It’s unnerving and unsettling.”

 For Whisper Editions, Wolkoff has made available an exclusive print from her celebrated series “Nocturne.” The image depicts the silhouette of a single branch of an oak tree. Wolkoff took the photograph in Georgia, the home state of a good part of her mother’s family, and, incidentally, of O’Connor. “The branch is completely decontextualized,” she says. “You’re unsure what you’re looking at. It’s a branch, but a more mysterious, unknown version of a branch.”