As Publisher and Editor of PORTICO, a magazine dedicated to literary and visual stories, Karen Gilder learned to recognize exceptional images. From her first film camera, a Pentax K1000, Karen has always sought to find images to both enhance and disclose stories, images that in speaking to her might have greater reach: capturing the magic in moments and landscapes and faces. Trained in photojourn
alism at the University of Southern Mississippi, her photographic style seeks to suspend specific time and certain place, to create the magic of a moment. Returning to photography, Karen thought people and street scenes would capture her attention the most. But, as with most things, you find comfort around you; you understand the places and grasp the lives around you; you recognize the slightest seconds of change in that world…and the stories they tell. Turns out, surrounded as she is by it here where she lives every day, Karen discovered that ease of place in nature.