Debbie Cain is a photographic artist born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She fell in love with photography at the age of eight, when her mother gave her an old instamatic camera. When she took her first photography class in high school, she was instantly hooked on the printing process. Nothing gave her more pleasure than working in a darkroom and watching her image come to life in the developer.
At San Jose State University, she received a minor in Fine Art Photography and a B.A. in Magazine Journalism. After college, she was able to really hone her printing skills working at a custom photography lab for five years as a black and white printer and she continued to shoot film exclusively for many years. In 2010, she was gifted a digital camera and now enjoys the creative freedom it allows her to incorporate into her work. She also loves working in alternative processes like emulsion transfers, platinum palladium printing and recently has started working with the Mordançage process.
“Photography is my tool for capturing moments I see in the world. It is a way for me to instantly relive an emotion that I experienced at the moment I clicked the shutter. It allows me to share that moment and emotion with others. The world has a myriad of subjects I find beautiful, interesting and amazing. It is my perspective of the world that I want to capture and share with my viewers. Today, with digital technology, I am able to take it one step further and create a more artistic perspective with my images in post-production as reflected in my new series ‘Kaleidoscope.’”
Debbie is an award winning and published artist who is currently a member of the San Francisco Women Artists Gallery and the Art Guild of Pacifica. She was published in Black and White Magazine in October 2001 and featured in Camera Obscura, an online Romanian magazine which featured her black and white infrared images. In 2012 she was published in International Masters of Photography, Volume 1 and in Important World Artists, Volume 1, in 2013.
