Award-winning photographer Kari Rowe — who also happens to be Lakota, Ojibwe, and Irish, an activist, jewelry maker and new mom — brought her keen eye and multifaceted talents to our recent Bull Run and women’s work campaigns. She has built a career in commercial photography, while also finding time to design jewelry, participate in local indigenous activist events, help native businesses with visual content creation and nurture her massive garden. She says, “As a blended heritage female of very tiny stature, I know what it is to have to create a space for yourself in a world that wasn’t built for you to have one.”
Growing up on rural Vashon Island in the Puget Sound, Kari spent her days divvying up farm chores, building forts and playing in the woods with her two sisters. When she wasn’t being homeschooled or running around barefoot, she’d assist her mother, a wedding and portrait photographer. “I have always had a camera in my hands,” she says. “We were too poor to afford film, except when my mom had an expired roll of 35mm she would gift me, [so] I typically had an empty camera in my hands ‘taking pictures’ since I can remember.”
Her interest in visual arts continued to grow, and when Kari went to college, she found herself spending all of her time in the darkroom. “After trying my hand at my dream as a train-hopping, photo-taking hobo and deciding that wasn’t for me after all, I moved to Portland, Oregon.” She enrolled in a graphic design program at Portland State University and worked for a creative agency that specialized in content for outdoor and lifestyle brands. After eight years of acting as everything from in-house photographer to art buyer and producer, she decided to go off on her own.
“The thing I am most interested in at this moment is creating space wherever I go for everyone and everything that comes into my life to feel safe, honored, heard and loved,” she says of her philosophy these days. “I try my best to give those who never felt like they had a voice or a place to express themselves, a place to do so.” When it came to our women’s work campaign last spring, she says it was everything she could want in a project: “Getting to be outside, surrounded by strong women, working with tools, motorcycles and getting a glimpse of the amazing skills they possess.” She adds that she set out to tell the stories of the women on the jobsite, who she saw, “Forging their way through male-dominated fields and doing so with strength, kindness and a huge smile.”
Looking forward, Kari and her partner hope to build a mobile, self-sustaining work-live unit so they can hit the road as they create a nonprofit connecting donors and the individuals and communities they help. They also want to continue to use their combined skillsets — photographer, journalist, designer, carpenter and activist — to support and expand programs in indigenous communities. She says, “I hope to tell their stories as they want them told, to be able to give their voices a platform that honors them, as the stewards of this land and as individuals, and the brilliant work they are doing.”
To see more of Kari’s photography and to keep up with her future pursuits, follow along on Instagram @karirowephoto or at karirowe.com.