Suzie Katz is a photographer, speaker, educator, producer, and is giving back to the world that has given her so much by creating and running an educational non-profit organization called PhotoWings. Our mission is to highlight and help facilitate the power of photography to influence the world. We help photography to be better understood, created, utilized, seen, and saved.
Through her own photography experiences, she has a developed a deep understanding of the under-utilized skills, knowledge, and wisdom honed by the world’s best storytellers and related professionals. These can also be an important inspiration to others’ work and lives both inside and outside the photo silo across generations, cultures, and disciplines. Such ideas can be utilized for self-discovery, better communication, critical thinking, visual literacy, resilience, storytelling and understanding context, among others, and are also valued as social emotional learning and executive function skills. To document and more richly utilize that legacy we’ve created, along with our innovative partners, 100’s of hours of interviews, presentations, and other educational content incorporating these ideas for replication, adaptation, or inspiration.
Suzie also thinks a lot about better utilizing the often under-appreciated value and potential of photos. To do that, however, involves saving images from being lost to the world. Photos that may not seem important today can be deeply important legacy later for loved ones, for multiple uses in education, and valued as history. So many photos are tossed, lost to the elements or technology in what is sometimes referred to as the “digital dark ages” that they’re no longer available, so an important aspect of our work is to proactively address this timely issue. As photo curator Malcolm Daniel states “Each time we lose a photograph that has power, we’ve lost the opportunity to be changed by it”.
