LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

The 2021 Paula Riff Award Winner: Katie Shapiro by Aline SmithsonJune 28, 2026

©Katie Shapiro, Childsplay

In early February 2021, we lost a bright light and singular artist, the incomparable Paula Riff. She left behind her daughter, along with an expansive community of friends, artists, and admirers, all grappling with the profound absence of her presence and vision. In honor of Paula, Lenscratch and the Center of Photographic Art established The Paula Riff Award in 2021 as a way to celebrate and extend her enduring legacy. Paula was an innovator who pushed photography beyond its conventional boundaries, using cameraless techniques and historical processes to create luminous objects of extraordinary beauty and tactility. The award recognizes artists who similarly challenge the limits of the medium through work that foregrounds the artist’s hand—whether through alternative photographic processes, cutting, sewing, weaving, sculptural intervention, or other acts of material transformation.

The Center of Photographic Art has just opened the exhibition, Changing the Narrative
The First 5 Years of Paula Riff Award Winners, featuring work by Aimee Beaubien, Minwoo Lee, Paula McCartney, Marni Myers, and Katie Shapiro. The exhibition will be on view through July 26th, 2026.

This week, we revisit the work of the award’s five previous recipients, culminating on Friday with the announcement of the 2026 winner. Today we feature the work of Katie Shapiro, whos practice investigates the intangible, using photography and sculpture to give form to what resists visibility or language. Her recent work centers on motherhood, expanding her exploration of perception, emotional presence, and the unseen forces that shape our inner and outer worlds.

In this new body of work, Shapiro considers the body as both vessel and cosmos, grounding her practice in a tactile language of materiality while reaching toward something metaphysical and expansive. Moving between geological and human time, her photographs and sculptural forms reveal the layered accumulations of memory and experience, offering meditative reflections on connection, transformation, and the unseen forces shaping daily life.

©Katie Shapiro, Cranberry Moon

The Other Side of the Moon

Motherhood has deeply shaped my artistic practice, attuning me to the intuitive, cyclical, and often unseen aspects of life. It offers a lived experience of duality—self and other, nurturing and fierce—that echoes through my work as I explore the unconscious forces beneath daily reality.

Through sculpture and layered photography, I engage with imagery such as the moon, stones, and fragments of my children’s bodies as portals into emotional and psychic terrain. The moon’s shifting phases mirror the rhythms of motherhood and the feminine body—cycles of creation, expansion, and return. These natural patterns guide my process, inviting a slowing down and a deeper listening to inner and outer tides.

My work traces processes of wounding and healing—echoes of rupture and repair that mirror the cycles of birth, loss, and renewal. I’m drawn to the tension between the celestial and the terrestrial: the body as both vessel and cosmos, rooted yet infinite. Stones, in particular, serve as anchors of healing—holding the weight of geological time while absorbing the touch of the present moment.

Between geological and human time, I find a space where the slow layering of the earth mirrors the accumulations of memory and care within the body. My practice becomes an act of attunement, revealing the quiet continuities between matter and spirit, body and landscape, the lunar and the living.

©Katie Shapiro, Crescent in Rose Quartz

Katie Shapiro’s practice explores the ineffable—making visible what cannot be seen. Her recent work focuses on themes of motherhood, deepening her ongoing investigation into perception, presence, and the unseen. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA in Photography from CalArts.

Shapiro’s work has been exhibited internationally, with recent and past shows at institutions including Aperture Gallery, Kopeikin Gallery, Klompching Gallery, Christopher Grimes Gallery, and The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA. Her work has appeared in Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, and New York Magazine.

Her work is included in numerous private and public collections, notably the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Huntington Library and Art Collection, the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, and the Amon Carter Museum Library.

Shapiro has held residencies at the Banff Centre in Canada and Bullseye Glass in Pasadena, and is currently attending Mass MoCA as an artist-in-residence. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Instagram: @katieshapirostudio