Niniane Kelley: I really don’t know very much about you, honestly. I don’t know how, but somehow I started following you on Instagram, and your page is very much focused on your work, so it’s just like, I don’t know much about who you are, I just know these images.

Patricia Bender: I’ve been working away very quietly on my own for about 15, 16 years now. I can always remember when I started photography, it was 9/11. I went to take my first photography class and the tragedy happened and it was cancelled, so that was when I first started studying photography. So it’s been about 17 years, which is hard to believe. But I’ve been just plugging away doing my thing, mostly in New Jersey and Michigan, which is where I’m from originally. And just recently with this body of work it’s really caught on and gotten some attention, so more people know who I am now, which is strange!

I’m a late adopter on just about everything. I do analog only, from the beginning I’ve just used analog cameras. I’ve never had any camera that does anything for me, I really don’t know anything about digital, and I’ve always worked in the darkroom. So, I’m kind of late to social media. I didn’t do Facebook for a long time and I just started Instagram, I don’t think I’ve been even doing it for a year. So, all of that’s kind of new for me as well. And it’s been amazing, especially Instagram. I like the visual nature of it, and I think that’s led to a lot of people seeing my work who have never seen it before.

NK: Tell me a little bit about your history and your background, you said you grew up in Michigan and now you live in New Jersey.

PB: I’m a midwesterner; I was born in Iowa and moved to Michigan in third grade and went all the way though high school and a couple years of college in Michigan. I got married and my husband’s job brought us to the East Coast, so I ended up finishing up my college degree at Rutgers and we’ve been on the east coast ever since. And my initial love was dance, that’s what I did for the first 25 to 30 years of my life. It was my passion. I performed and taught in New Jersey and Manhattan and when I decided I wasn’t going to perform any more and I didn’t want to choreograph or teach I kind of floundered around for quite a few years trying new things, a hodgepodge of things. I wouldn’t even call them careers, they were just things that I experimented with. And when I found photography I was shocked I found something that I really loved as much as dance, and I’ve been really passionate about it since then.



NK: Yeah, that really interested me when I read it in one of your artist statements, because I actually have a similar background in that I was a figure skater. I have the same experience in being involved in movement and choreography and then having that go away and needing to fill that artistic void, and that’s how I ended up getting into photography.

PB: That’s interesting! Because it is, it’s all consuming. And because people don’t understand with dance, and I’ve often compared it to sports, but you’re still young and in the thing that you love to do the most you’re considered old! And it’s a very strange feeling to be in your twenties and be told that you’re too old to do this kind of stuff any more, and all of a sudden what are you going to do? Basically, you can teach or you can find something new, and to find something new is hard to do. But I was thrilled when I found photography, I really was. I tried writing a lot, worked as a journalist for a while and did a lot of personal writing with poetry and journals, but I like the freedom of photography, the visual nature of it. When you’re writing you’re so in your brain and I like the freedom of getting out of my mind, and I feel that photography really does that for me.