When I look at Katie Falkenberg’s photographs, I get the feeling I’m visually eavesdropping—seeing moments that aren’t mine from a distance, like looking through an illumined window on an evening dog walk. As I talk to her, it becomes clear she’s cultivated a unique style developed over years as a newspaper photojournalist. She’s someone who wears observation and story like a second skin. 

We converse on an early day in December 2020 at the end of the long year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when our only connection to others has often been photos snapped on phones during lockdowns and quarantines trying to convey everything we want to say in a single moment. Which, in a photograph, Falkenberg says, is everything.

“Whether it’s a moment with a fish,” she says, “or a moment between a mother and daughter, if you can capture that moment, there’s magic.”…

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above On an early autumn morning, Scott Howell casts for steelhead on Oregon’s Rogue River.