bio
Ky Blohm was born in McKinney, Texas and grew up in multiple states across the Southwest. He moved to Farmington, New Mexico at ten years old. At fourteen, he began attending the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, where he graduated in May of 2020. Currently he is a senior at New Mexico State University, majoring in Digital Filmmaking and minoring in Journalism and Media Studies. Ky will be graduating with his bachelor’s degree in May of 2024.
Ky is a portrait photographer who has been working with clients for over 7 years. He began by serving his fellow cadets at NMMI, offering sessions for dances and graduating seniors. In college, Ky discovered his passion for editing films. He has edited numerous short films while studying at the Creative Media Institute at NMSU and is in the process of completing the editing for a short documentary sponsored by CMI and the US Forest Service for the Centennial Celebration of the Gila Wilderness. Along with editing, Ky discovered a passion for screenwriting. Currently he is working on his first feature film.
Artist's Statement
I make photographs because I love people. I think people are the most interesting subject in the world; I could photograph the same person a hundred times and catch a different part of them, their personality, every time. I seek to capture some of the most important and special moments in a person’s life: senior year, an engagement, a wedding, the birth of a child. I want to document memories for people as they create them, give them something they’ll be able to cherish and love forever.
My favorite moments to capture are the candid ones, the ones where people are being themselves, forgetting they’re on camera. My biggest photographic inspirations have always been documentary photographers, particularly those who served as war correspondents and those who photographed hardship throughout the world. Two of my favorite photographers are Dorothea Lange, who’s work during the Great Depression are some of the most memorable photos of the era, and Robert Capa, who produced some of the most famous images from the Second World War, taken at the Normandy beaches on D-Day. Their images artfully capture the rawness of being human, the tone of the human condition at the time they were taken. Their images are striking, filled with emotion and conflict. They worked during some of the most trying times in human history and somehow still produced some of the most beautiful images. If they can create such beautiful photos in such difficult times, photos that capture some of the worst parts of being human, how beautiful can the image I capture of some of the best parts of being human be?
As I grew up, I pursued a lot of career paths that all had one thing in common: helping people. Whether it was serving in the armed forces, becoming a therapist, or becoming a cop, I knew I always wanted to help. In documentary style portrait photography, I found a way to combine my passions for photographing people and helping them. When I was little, I remember sitting down with my mom to look at photos from my parents’ wedding and asking why there were big white spots and streaks through most of them. The photographer had broken his camera that morning and light was leaking in onto the film, scarring most of the images of that day. I remember the sadness in my mom’s voice as she talked about how she wished the photos hadn’t been ruined. I want to be the person people can rely on to capture the human moments, the emotions, the feeling of one of the most important days of their lives.
I am driven by the desire to help people hold onto their happiest memories through photographs. I’m going to use my passion for photography to document family history, perhaps the most important history to any of us.