© Cynthia Gladis

Cynthia Gladis is a New Jersey-based photographer whose previous career as a graphic designer informs her work. Print and digital features include FRAMES magazine, RfotoFolio, The Visual Conservancy’s Peer 3, Pinky Arts Press, Landscape Photo Books and Street Photography magazine websites and podcasts. Gladis has participated in group exhibitions including the Plastic Camera Show at the Kansas City Stockyard, Picture This! at the Flagler County Art League, Pinky Arts at Mignolo Arts Center. She had her first solo exhibition The Library Gallery in Metuchen, NJ, in 2024. She was honored to be FRAMES second Artist in Residence. More of her work is available on her website and her Instagram feed.

© Cynthia Gladis

Cynthia Gladis is a New Jersey-based photographer whose work transforms ordinary surroundings into sharp, funny, and formally elegant observations that sit between documentary seeing and visual play.

Gladis’ sensibility is rooted in the familiarity of suburban American life, but she never takes that familiarity for granted. Across her practice, she is attentive to what hides in plain sight: the strange corner, the accidental joke, the haunting shadow, the man-altered landscape, and the beauty in the overlooked. Her humor often has an edge; her images portray the oddness, artifice, and quiet embedded in ordinary places.

© Cynthia Gladis

DNJ: Tell us about your childhood. 


CG: I lost my dad when I was a toddler, and my mom raised my sister and me by herself. My mom was a very strong woman who gave us enough love for two parents, and I’ll always be grateful for the way she raised us with kindness and empathy, and inspired our creativity through her photography.

My sister was more interested in outdoor activities while I was more of the shy, bookish type who was always doing something creative—needlework, knitting, drawing, and making up crazy stories for Barbie and Ken. My sister and I were always close and have remained so to this day.

© Cynthia Gladis

I’m told my dad loved the mountains and lakes. However, my mom was a lifelong fan of the sea and its beaches and she passed that love on to me. I remember many summers at the New Jersey Shore. We played on the beach all day. At night, we would visit the boardwalks at Asbury Park or Point Pleasant; often my grandparents or cousins joined us. They had an amusement park vibe from the sounds of the rides and the aroma of cheesesteaks, pizza, and cotton candy, but you knew you were at the beach because the salt air permeated everything. It was a heavenly place to be as a child, even though I always got dizzy on the rides (something that continues to this day!) I remember being very tired on the ride home—but always able to perk up in time to see what was playing on the screens of the drive-in theater as we passed. The good old days!

My childhood was a happy one, though it was tinged with the sadness of missing someone I never had the chance to know.

© Cynthia Gladis

DNJ: How and when did you become interested in photography?

CG: I always had an interest in photography because my mom had an Argus C3 (“the brick”) and took lots of slides of us growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. We still enjoy looking at them. Occasionally, I restore some and convert them to black and white—especially the ones of us acting silly—for an ongoing series I call Vintage Jersey Girl (with full credit to my mom as the photographer).

Growing up, I had small film cameras: a Brownie, an Instamatic, etc., but I never looked at photography as an artistic pursuit. I used them to record what happened around me, or things I did with friends, you know—classic snapshots.

It wasn’t until I was in my late 50s that I decided I wanted to “be a photographer” and express myself artistically through my photography. Initially, I took photographs using my Galaxy Note 3. I started with clouds because they interested me and were accessible. I posted some images on Facebook, and there I found multiple groups devoted to cloud watching. I believe that is where my fondness for pareidolia started, because we’ve all lain on the grass on a summer day, looked up at the clouds and found ones that “looked like something.”

I also started photographing things around me, paying more attention to composition and color. I posted the images on my Facebook timeline and in various photography groups there, where I began getting feedback about my photographic eye. That’s when I knew I wanted to do more than shoot with a phone—I wanted to learn the technical aspects of digital photography.

© Cynthia Gladis

© Cynthia Gladis

I wasn’t doing much traveling at the time, but I had a credit card that awarded miles for every dollar I spent. Those rewards came in handy when I wanted to buy my first DSLR and a couple of lenses, and I was able to use them to pay for my Canon SL1. It was a pretty basic camera, but it sparked an urge to find the system I would feel most comfortable with. That eventually turned out to be a mirrorless Fuji system.

I read everything I could about the exposure triangle but soon discovered that I was less interested in the technical side than in subject matter and strong composition. I preferred to shoot in RAW so I would have more latitude in post-production. I used—and still use—Photoshop or Lightroom to bring out what I envisioned when I made the image.

© Cynthia Gladis

I joined more Facebook groups; most focused on minimalist photography. It was an aesthetic I had always loved, and it fit naturally with my background in graphic design. Although my corporate career was effectively behind me, I found that I still “saw ” graphically whenever I went out with my camera. Composition is very important to me. I pre-visualize how a scene might work as a photograph, paying close attention to the edges of the frame and deciding what to include and what to leave out.

Even when I photograph the messy urban scenes I love, my background in graphic design brings a sense of order to the way I compose. I strongly believe that my design experience improved my skills in photographic composition. But, as often happens with Facebook groups, the rules and regulations—and people’s different interpretations of minimalism—eventually got in the way. That turned me off to groups devoted to a single genre.

I decided to shoot what I wanted, when I wanted, and that was when my work began to attract more attention. I started paying closer attention to the extraordinary range of subjects around me: the irony and quirkiness of life in the New Jersey suburbs; the crazy transition from suburban New Jersey to urban New York City, as seen through train windows; and the city itself, with its architecture, people, and overall joie de vivre.

© Cynthia Gladis

DNJ: Tell us about your photographic journey since that initial interest.

CG: My photographic journey is littered with the remains of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS)! I spent ten years buying, trying, and selling a variety of cameras and lenses while developing my style. I listened to a lot of my new photo friends talk about their gear, the weight of it, what they like to carry, when to use certain lenses, etc. My husband also had a Pentax film camera and some vintage Takumar lenses from the 1960s that he gave to me.

During the pandemic, my GAS returned with a vengeance. I bought more vintage film cameras and even more lenses, and spent a few months enjoying the film experience. But once the film was developed and scanned, I was still ending up with digital files. I decided I might as well continue with my rapidly expanding collection of digital cameras. After using Canon for a while and then Sony, I switched to and settled on the Fujifilm system as my weapon of choice. The film gear sits in my office; many rolls of black and white film sit in my freezer. And that was more or less the end of my film experiment. The vintage lenses adapt well to my Fuji gear, and there is something about the way Fuji designs its cameras (the dials!) that allows you to work fully manually and feel like you are actually making a photograph, not using a miniature computer to create it.

© Cynthia Gladis

© Cynthia Gladis

When I began, I shot anything and everything: clouds, street photography, minimalist scenes, rust, abstracts. One person said to me, “You are all over the place; you should stick with one thing and just do that.” Of course, a comment like that was all I needed to spur me on to experiment even more, expand my definition of good subjects, and try a little bit of everything.

One of my favorite experiments—and something I still return to often—is shooting with an infrared-converted camera (that is just one great thing to do with old gear!). I tried some false color infrared and didn’t care for it, so now I stick to 720 nm. I don’t make what I call the clichéd infrared photos of white foliage and misty cemeteries. Instead, I use it for high-contrast black-and-white images with dramatic skies.

I never paid much attention to what other photographers were making. I just kept doing my own thing. Eventually, I realized that what resonated most was my quirky way of viewing things and a deadpan approach to my surroundings.

Through social media, I had the good fortune of meeting several influential people who believed in me and my work. One was the editor-in-chief of FRAMES magazine. That exposure led to some wonderful opportunities including a print feature in the magazine, and an invitation to be FRAMES’ second Artist-in-Residence, which took place online. For that, I recorded myself on two photo walks, sharing how I see and why I find particular subjects interesting. I kept the videos light in tone so there are even a few instances of the gymnastics I will go through to get a particular image.

My online presence also led to being invited to exhibit the work of my choice at my local library’s gallery. I decided to show Sand Stories, which are abstract images of sand patterns I see on the beach in my home away from home, Hilton Head, South Carolina. It was my first exhibition and I found it quite challenging—choosing the images, figuring out how to display them, doing all of the marketing, and planning the opening. I enlisted the help of two women who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, gallerist Debra Klomp Ching, and you, as I would have been flying by the seat of my pants, otherwise. I did manage to sell a few pieces but would have found the experience worthwhile even if I hadn’t.

© Cynthia Gladis, from the series Sand Stories

© Cynthia Gladis, from the series Sand Stories

DNJ: I know you as more of an “I want to show others what I see” photographer than someone who begins with a concept and makes work from that starting point. Say you find yourself in a city you’ve never visited and have time to walk around with your camera. How do you decide where to go and what to photograph? How do you go about looking?

CG: I love this question! Over the past two years, I’ve become quite the traveler. Many of my trips have taken me to cities I’ve never visited before.  However, I approach the local photo walks the same way I do an unfamiliar city—I pick up my camera and shoot the first thing that interests me. That simple exercise gets my juices flowing, and I just keep going. I find that I lean toward the same subject matter no matter where I am—I love backlighting, shadows, silhouettes of people, architecture, and traces of human presence (like laundry).

© Cynthia Gladis

I try to make images that are distinctive to a location. It can be hard to strike a balance between photography that looks simply like travel imagery and photography that honors a place more artistically. I had a great opportunity to do just that during a recent photography workshop in Venice. Although I shoot a lot of architecture in New York City, Venice offered something entirely different. I photographed the buildings and their reflections in the canals. At night, I was drawn to the city lights, crumbling façades, and old streetlights. At a similar workshop in Switzerland last summer, I found inspiration in reflections in the windows at the airport and the boats at Lake Lucerne. I tend to avoid typical tourist images unless I want to preserve a memory in my Lightroom catalog, which has become a sort of journal of the last decade of my life.

The more of the world I see, the more I realize how much we humans have in common. That has been one of the best things I’ve learned from my photographic travels. Traveling with my camera has also become one of my favorite things to do.

© Cynthia Gladis

DNJ: Which of the series you’ve made is your favorite, and why?

CG: I don’t have a particular favorite. I have come to realize that my true voice is the one that’s unexpected with a bit of humor (even if I’m the only one who gets the joke).

Pareidolia—the tendency to see faces or familiar forms in ordinary objects—is one way that quirkiness appears in my work. The image on the cover of FRAMES MONO is a perfect example. I was walking around a construction site looking for interesting graphic compositions when I felt like someone was looking at me—a very odd feeling, but it happens to me quite often. I turned around and saw a standpipe against the building with a rag that had become wrapped around it. The pipe looked like goggles, and the rag looked like a scarf that had seen better days. I titled it World War I Flying Ace. Perhaps that is not what everyone sees when they look at my photo, but it is what I see. It is now one of my favorites.

I may be the only person I know who has traffic cones conduct “con(e)versations.” Because I frequently experience pareidolia and tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, traffic cones often look to me as if they are interacting. My “con(e)versations” pair a photograph with a short bit of dialogue spoken by one or more cones (sometimes a cone talks to itself!). A photograph of a traffic cone can be art on its own, but giving the cones dialogue makes it something different. I don’t do this all the time, but sometimes I see cones interacting and their “con(e)versations” pop into my head. It’s fun. It’s also a good brain exercise. I put together a book of them for a friend who was going through some health challenges, and I may eventually self-publish it. The cones are a blessing and a curse because I have someone DMing me a cone meme at least three times a week. And, of course, I do not want to just be known for shooting traffic cones!

© Cynthia Gladis

I also have an ongoing series I enjoy in which I photograph the world through train, subway, and Uber/Lyft windows.

I find the greatest satisfaction in discovering offbeat images in unexpected places. They are not a series, but they turn up in almost every photo shoot I do. For example, last October I attended a landscape master class in Scotland. By the time I noticed the laundry, I had seen many unpopulated natural landscapes. They were beautiful, but they didn’t give me the same satisfaction I get from photographing a city or another place with signs of human presence, even when no people are visible—a bicycle leaning against a building, a collection of brooms, or a potted plant in a window. Seeing some interesting-looking laundry blowing in the breeze in the middle of that Scottish landscape was a real treat for me.

That doesn’t mean I’ll never photograph natural landscapes again—I love photographing many things—but it’s the quirky gems that I’m most grateful for.

© Cynthia Gladis

© Cynthia Gladis

DNJ: Recently, FRAMES published a “zine” of your work via its FRAMES MONO publication. How did the project come about, and what did making it involve? Who handled the selection, curation, and sequencing? What was your role beyond making the images?

CG: The zine was a huge honor. Tomasz Trzebiatowski, the editor-in-chief of FRAMES magazine, invited me to be featured in the second edition of FRAMES MONO. Each edition is a saddle-stitched collection of 40 photographs by one photographer with an essay and an autographed cover.

I was very involved in the process from start to finish. I made the initial selection, although Tomasz did suggest that I include a cone or two. Choosing 40 images that made sense together was one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do, photographically speaking. I am nothing if not prolific, and I have thousands of photographs I would have loved to include. My first pass was sort of “Cindy’s greatest hits”—images that had received more attention than others.

Detail: Cover, FRAMES MONO – Cynthia Gladis (Photo credit: © FRAMES; Cover image: WWII Flying Ace © Cynthia Gladis)

I eventually narrowed the possibilities down to around 100 photographs. The Scotland workshop included three hours of one-on-one Lightroom training with Bob Killen, who ran the landscape master class. Bob didn’t think I needed assistance with post-processing, so he suggested we use the time to cull that group. He also brought in a gallery owner he knows to offer another perspective.

Their feedback was invaluable as I decided which images worked best together. It ended up being—in effect—my first portfolio review! The process confirmed that my unique and sometimes whimsical way of seeing was what connected the photographs, and my choices became clearer as I considered their comments.

I also learned a lot about editing, sequencing, and the importance of “killing the beloved darlings.” I had heard that phrase before, but I never understood it the way I do now, after having to kill a few of my own! Once we had an edit we felt good about, W. Scott Olsen of FRAMES created the final sequence. He also interviewed me and wrote the introductory essay.

There are still photographs I would have liked to include, especially some of my sand abstracts and more of my New York City architecture. But I’ve come to realize that those series might be better as small publications of their own. And I discovered that people can enjoy my photographs without titles!

© Cynthia Gladis

DNJ: What do you hope people take from your work?

CG: I hope that people feel a certain joy, or happiness, when looking at my work. Perhaps they think it’s amusing; maybe its clean style makes them feel calm, as it does me.” I am not politically vocal, nor do I make work from personal challenges. My sense of humor keeps me grounded and helps me enjoy this gift of life. I love getting the kind of feedback where a viewer says to me, “You see things that so many others would just walk right past.” I find a lot of interesting things—and beauty—in the everyday and I want to share that with others. All the better if it gives someone a chuckle.

© Cynthia Gladis

DNJ: What is next on the horizon for you?

CG: I have a lot of travel coming up. I always bring a camera, whether it is a photo-related trip or not.

I’ll be in Hilton Head in August where I will add more to my sand series. October will be a whirlwind, and I am already planning to be exhausted. I have a FRAMES Rendezvous—that’s what they call their workshops—in Seoul, South Korea. It’s limited to seven people, and I’ll be focused on honing my street photography chops. I will also be taking a cruise from Boston to Quebec with two longtime friends, but I plan to do a lot of photography on that trip, too. The third trip is another FRAMES Rendezvous to Fargo, North Dakota. Based upon Scott Olsen’s photography of that city, I’m really looking forward to that one. I know I will enjoy each experience and will be walking around with an eye out for the out of the ordinary; that brings me the most joy. I am sure I will bring back many memories and add to my Lightroom catalog!

I also plan to follow through on the small publications I mentioned, including ones devoted to my sand abstracts and observations of New York City. All of these projects take time, as you know, and I’m one of those people who’d rather be out shooting and making new images than doing anything else.

DNJ: Cynthia, thank you ever so much for the time and thought you have give me for this interview. Readers, I hope you have enjoyed learning about Cynthia and her practice. 

© Cynthia Gladis, from the series, Sand Stories