Foley Gallery is pleased to present “Beauty Pageants,” an exhibition of documentary photography and portraiture by photographer Colby Katz.

While many children spend their Saturdays and Sundays indulging freely in games of tag and make believe, a few are on the road, marched and marching tall into a cutthroat industry of adorable. For the last five years, photographer Colby Katz has been documenting the behind the, and the scenes of child beauty pageants. Her long focus on this project comes as Katz herself was entered into pageants as a young girl.

As a fine art and documentary photographer Katz has often thrown her spotlight on subcultures, from the oddities of sideshow performers and blitzing of the paparazzi, to the blind liberty of nudists and quirk of small town beauty pageants. Subcultures we may gape and marvel at from afar yet rarely are allowed to survey from within. Katz’s “Beauty Pageants” series permits us an insider’s view, inside hotel rooms, elevators and hallways where teeny-tot contestants are being fussed and fawned over, preened and perfected, hair-sprayed and spray-tanned by a swarm of proud, ambitious mothers.

Pictured above, Rayne-Lin, “Little Miss Firecracker, LA,” hooks a tiny arm around the column of her towering pageant trophy. The golden accolade stands nearly twice the tike’s height. Katz will often frame some sort of exaggerated disproportion or incongruity, as between mother and child’s body, between their age, and purity.

Director and curator of the University of the Arts London Research Centre for Photography and the Archive, Val Williams, states in an article written for Photoworks magazine, that Katz, “belongs to an important and interesting group of women photographers including Sally Man, Rineke Djikstra, and Clare Strand who have explored the complexity of girlhood.” Williams continues to explain how Katz’s work employs “documentary methodology which is familiar within contemporary work - colour photographs which explore the bizarre nature of modern domestic society, seeking out oddities and contradictions.”

Colby Katz was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Florida. In 1998 she received her BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her work has appeared in books, magazines and has been internationally exhibited at such spaces as The National Portrait Gallery in London, FOAM Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam, and The Lennox Contemporary in Toronto. In 2004, she participated in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. Colby was selected by Photo District News as an Emerging Photographer in 2005, and in 2006, the Magenta Foundation also awarded her this title. Colby currently lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.