By Andy Butler

Rosie Karel is a photographer and artist from Chicago, Illinois, now living in Southern California. With a background in the arts, she didn’t find her calling with photography until the mid-2000s. However, things didn’t truly click into place until she discovered iPhone photography.

Rosie’s photography has an eclectic style, but her images’ common thread is very much rooted in Hipstamatic with a soft, painterly approach. Many scenes that she captures showcase the coastal landscapes along with lone figures near her home in Southern California. Meanwhile, other images capture nature, candid street scenes or images that adopt a more artistic and abstract style.

I caught up with Rosie to find out more about how her background in the arts has shaped her approach to photography and how her unique style of photography has developed.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your photographic journey and how you discovered smartphone photography.

I was born and lived until my early 30s in the diverse, vibrant and cultural city of Chicago, Illinois. I’ve always had the desire to create, although photography was not my creative expression of choice as a youth. Drawing, making detailed designs for printmaking on paper or textiles, and working with clay were what interested me early on. I was what you could call a doodler, always with a pencil, pen or marker in hand, sketching anything or creating designs.

After graduation from high school, I enrolled in several classes as a part-time student at the Art Institute of Chicago. The drawing classes exposed me to live models and gave me a deeper understanding of composition and perspective. They were very positive experiences that established a good foundation for my future artistic endeavors.

However, I made a mistake with the painting class I chose. The class I had signed up for offered no structure or instruction on technique, which was what I needed. I mostly spent the whole class time observing the other artists, trying to get inspired and learn by watching. Instead, I felt lost and became frustrated. The end result was that I deeply buried my desire to paint for many years. At this point, the reality of life set in; I began working and found less and less time to express myself artistically to any real degree.

About 15 years later, when my daughter was born, my creative journey was reignited, and my photographic journey began. I wanted to capture every moment of her life and development. So, I bought my first camera, a small Canon point-and-shoot. As she got older, I saw she had also been blessed with the creative gene, and we would proceed to spend endless hours drawing and doing art projects together. This awakened the creative sleeping giant within me, which I know will never go dormant again.