Kaitlyn Yates is an analog photographic artist and practicing archivist based in New York City. Born in California's San Joaquin Valley and raised on both the West and East Coasts, she relocated to New York City in 2012 where she earned her Bachelor of Arts from CUNY Hunter College. She was recently awarded an archival research fellowship at the Easton Foundation.
Her photographs catalog slivers of the ordinary, namely moments in between joy, loss, boredom, tenderness, and contentment. She is interested in the emotional architecture of everyday life, the intimacy a space can possess because of who has existed within it, and the interconnectedness between people, objects, and place. Underlying her work is a desire to create lasting records of fleeting experiences. She is particularly drawn to the tensions between presence and absence, memory and forgetting, and how narratives are shaped as much by what is missing as by what survives.
In addition to image-making, her practice centers on family documentation and the creation of personal archives. Through photographs made by relatives, inherited objects, and remaining pieces of family history, she examines identity shaped through memory and developed by experiences of grief, fractured relationships, and the disappearance of documents and photographs that might otherwise serve as record. In response to these absences, she approaches photography and archiving as acts of preservation that acknowledge both what remains and what cannot be recovered. Through efforts to reconstruct fragmented histories and examine gaps within her familial line, she considers how photographs can function as sites of connection and mourning, as well as reverence. Her series PLACES I'VE BEEN WITH MY FATHER was featured in Pearl Press's Elegy Issue. She currently lives and works in Queens, New York.