Kathy Fridstein

Raised near Chicago, Kathy Fridstein began taking photographs as a child during family road trips in the Western U.S. These trips cemented her respect for the vast beauty and history of the American landscape and sparked her lifelong interest in using photography to explore the intimate relationship between ourselves and the environment.

Kathy received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon graduation she began a 40-year career of teaching in the Pacific Northwest and showing her art. Kathy’s work has been widely exhibited at regional and international venues, including a recent show in Barcelona in 2024, and an earlier exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, where it was prominently featured in a three-person show. Her work is included in numerous public art collections, including the 1% Washington Public Art Purchase, University of Washington Medical Center, and the Seattle Public Utilities Purchase. Kathy lives in Port Townsend.

Chin Music Press will be publishing her project, Landscapes of Forgotten Forts, in September 2026. Landscapes of Forgotten Forts explores relationships between history and art, war and peace, built and natural environments, absence and presence. For the last 17 years Kathy has photographed Forts Worden, Flagler and Casey, the three forts that comprised the Triangle of Fire that protected Admiralty Inlet during WWI and WWII. Her photographs hone in on a meditation on history through a certain kind of beauty, re-envisioning these spaces built for wartime and battles that never occurred, now overtaken by peaceful nature, repurposed to respond to the present day.