Feature by Caroline Nieto
Photos by Cas Sommer
Kendall Bartel is a senior, ‘25, at Barnard College studying Art History. She received her first camera one summer before sleepaway camp and has taken pictures ever since then. We met at The Hungarian Pastry Shop one afternoon to talk about life and art.
Kendall Bartel is finally on the other side of the camera. After working on Ratrock’s photography team since her sophomore year, here she makes her debut as an artist in her own right. Outside of Ratrock, Kendall is a seasoned photographer—her credentials range from taking pictures for Hoot, Barnard’s fashion magazine; taking graduation pictures for Barnard and Columbia students; and taking classes at the International Center of Photography. Yet for a long time, Kendall hesitated to even call herself a photographer. Even after taking photos consistently since high school, she finds it easy to slip into imposter syndrome. Recently, Kendall came to realize that the only person who refused to recognize her work was herself: “I could fall down that rabbit hole of delegitimizing myself. Or I can just say I’m a photographer.”
The first time Kendall remembers taking photography seriously was when she was sixteen years old. She and her friends would take the train from their Massachusetts suburb into Boston to wander around and take pictures for Instagram. They would arrive with bags full of clothes, facilitating their costume changes in the city’s public restrooms. These photoshoots were the start of Kendall’s interest in photography, at that point simply a vessel for her love of fashion. Even now, she rarely purchases clothes for her shoots, using her own wardrobe or the subjects’ own clothes. Kendall “didn’t realize that people bought things for costume parties until this fall.” Her personal style is one reason for her distaste for the commercial side of fashion. In her photos, Kendall aims to “expand the idea of what beauty is,” subverting expectations of what you might see in fashion photography.
While Kendall got her start taking pictures for Instagram, she sometimes has thoughts of scrubbing her entire catalog from the internet. She points to the falsity of the Instagram “photo dump,” which consists of a string of casual pictures on the same carousel: “There’s this presentation of authenticity that I think we all understand is incredibly calculated,” says Kendall. Her work stands in opposition to this feigned nonchalance—it announces itself, it’s purposely performative. Take her “Dollface” series with Hoot, which features models in sparkly pink and purple makeup posing in the skate park in Riverside Park. She often plays with this juxtaposition of setting and models, with an implied question in each of her pictures: why are these people here? And why do I want to know?
Kendall’s editorial shots and portraits make up the bulk of her portfolio, in part because of the relationship she has with her subjects. Most of the time the models in Kendall’s pictures are her friends—“I find the people that I know so interesting. Even if the individual is covered in feathers or glitter or wearing some ridiculous outfit, there’s still that person.” For this reason, street photography did not interest Kendall until she found herself in Seville, Spain.
While walking in the streets of the city, traffic stopped, incense burned in the air, and people began to chant. Kendall had stumbled into the middle of a parade for Holy Week, the week-long Catholic celebration preceding Easter. She says she was “in the right place at the right time,” and thought, “I actually, for once in my life, have my camera on me when I need it.” She incessantly snapped pictures that became some of her favorite photos she’d ever taken. One features a row of men in black suits holding up a statue of Jesus on a cross. It’s shot in black and white and in high exposure, the majority of light in the photo hitting the statue’s chest.
Kendall found herself in Seville that day as a part of a trip while studying abroad. For her entire junior year, Kendall studied at NYU Florence, an experience that’s been her biggest artistic inspiration to date. Her art history major allowed her to be abroad for the entire year, since Florence is a city rich with artistic history. Kendall’s Renaissance art class only met in the classroom for the midterm and the final—otherwise, most of her learning involved exploring Florence’s countless museums and public art displays. Regarding this artistic haven, Kendall simply said, “I love art. I love studying art. I love thinking about art. I love looking at art. I love talking about art. I love making art.” This environment brought out Kendall’s appetite for photography—almost every weekend she’d travel to a new city, scope out its sights, and capture them with her camera.
When in Rome, Kendall discovered the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa—a sculpture that features the saint draped in robes while an angel stands over her, bearing a spear. The work is just ten minutes from the train station, so Kendall visited it each of the five times she traveled to the city. Much of the art in Florence is biblical or historical, which has informed Kendall’s belief that art history is “just a lens through which to study history and philosophy.” The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa depicts everything that interests Kendall artistically: divinity, desire, and the body. “What we find beautiful and why” is an ongoing question in her work, where disjointed visual elements that don't seem to fit together come to form a beautiful image. To explain her idea of beauty, Kendall pointed to the Catholic tradition of relics, a part of a saint’s body that is deemed holy. Throughout Europe, these saints are immortalized by displays of these relics in churches. The disjointed parts of their lives are celebrated, even worshipped.
Upon returning to Barnard this fall, Kendall found herself in a time of “personal transformation and even upheaval,” partly a result of the campus’s increased surveillance in the wake of student protests. While this transformation has left Kendall with an unclear path to the future, she will be returning to Italy this fall for the Peggy Guggenheim internship in Venice. For the present, Kendall and her work remain a reminder of her time at Barnard and beyond. Her images are the visceral, strange, eclectic fragments of her past, worthy of their own relics.