Kate Schneider is a Toronto-based photographer whose work is based in the traditions of documentary storytelling and ethnography. Her most recent works focus on the impact that land, and the socialized landscape, have on individual and cultural identity in North America.
Kate was recognized by the Magenta Foundation’s 2015 Flash Forward competitions, and has recently shown her work at the Soho Photo gallery (New York), the Great Plains Art Museum (Nebraska), the Society of Photographic Education (Cleveland), and the floor of the United State Senate.
She received her MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University (2009). Kate is also an Instructor at OCAD.
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About ‘Rustbelt/Greenbelt’:
Landscape is mutable. What once was grand can fall into decay. What is now withered can become verdant.
This photo-essay looks at the symbolic features of place and the changing landscape of post-industrial America through the urban farming movement in Cleveland, Ohio. Within the urban farming movement, emerges two key narrative themes that are laden with rich and opposing imagery: decline and birth. The abandoned lot that once housed a factory is now the home to grazing sheep. Traces of a lost industrial society are camouflaged by mulch and growth.
Urban farming points to the decline of American industrialism, and the renewal of vacant land into a functioning and thriving landscape. This project aims to create a dialog on the changing boundaries of urban and rural, and the purpose of vacant land in a city’s urban core.
