©Kristen Pless, from the project, Family Farms

Photography Educator is a monthly series on Lenscratch. Once a month, we celebrate a dedicated photography teacher by sharing their insights, strategies and excellence in inspiring students of all ages. These educators play a transformative role in student development, acting as mentors and guides who create environments where students feel valued and supported, fostering confidence and resilience.

For the month of June, I am delighted to highlight the educator and artist Kristen Pless. Kristen is an assistant professor of photography at the University of Minnesota Duluth and her landscape work blends historic and contemporary photographic processes to create quietly moving and evocative images. Kristen goes beyond teaching technical proficiency in photography, graphic design, and studio lighting, guiding her students to think critically, take creative risks, and push the boundaries of their artistic practice. Through her supportive mentorship and emphasis on personal expression, she empowers students to develop confidence in their unique artistic voices. Kristen balances her careers as both an educator and an artist, while also raising two children and helping her husband run their native landscaping company. Her hard work, dedication and commitment is inspiring.

My work explores the layered relationships between memory, place, and identity. I’m drawn to the quiet intersections of history and personal narrative, where landscape, emotion, and time converge. The spaces I photograph are often expansive, still, and transitional, offering room for reflection and story.

By layering textures, archival fragments, and experimental processes, I aim to evoke the way memory unfolds, intuitive yet fragmented and nonlinear. Much of my work is inspired by the tension between presence and absence. I’m fascinated by how environments carry traces of what once was. How a single image or texture can evoke nostalgia, longing, or recognition.

Rather than document, I aim to slow time. To create visual spaces that invite contemplation and emotional resonance. I’m interested in how seemingly ordinary places can hold extraordinary weight, shaped as much by personal experience as by collective history.

©Kristen Pless, from the project, Family Farms

©Kristen Pless, from the project, Family Farms

©Kristen Pless, from the project, Family Farms

©Kristen Pless, from the project, Family Farms

Kristen has been teaching at the University of Minnesota Duluth for sixteen years.

ES: How and why did you get into teaching?

KP: I think that I, like many others, ended up teaching because I was inspired by some really great teachers. I also have a very strong drive to help others. When I was an undergrad at Montana State University we were given the opportunity to be teaching assistants for some of the intro level classes. Around the time that I was finishing my degree, I found that working with students was something I loved doing, so right after undergrad I applied for graduate programs with the intent of growing in my work conceptually and technically with the end goal of teaching when I finished my MFA.

ES: What keeps you engaged as an educator?

KP: I find I’m most engaged when working through concepts and ideas with students, from helping them get from the basic start of an idea to something that is really meaningfull to them. I find this process to be very fulfilling.

ES: What is the most meaningful part of your job?

KP: For me, the most meaningful part of teaching is the trust and relationships built within the classroom. Sharing personal photographs can feel incredibly vulnerable, and creating a space where students feel safe enough to open up—their homes, their lives, past traumas, as well as their goals, interests, and curiosities—is something special.

ES: How do you help your students tap into curiosity and the creative process?

KP: Ask questions. Listen. Meet them where they are at. Know that the creative process doesn’t happen the same way for all students. Encourage them to try new things and keep the stakes fairly low.

©Kristen Pless, Wet plates from the project, Photographs from the Reserves

©Kristen Pless, Wet plates from the project, Photographs from the Reserves

©Kristen Pless, Wet plates from the project, Photographs from the Reserves

ES:Do you have any regrets?

KP: There are so many photographs I regret not taking. They live burned in my mind. The landscape will never be exactly as it was in that moment…I have tried returning to various spaces, but, when we aren’t in the same headspace, things look different, and it isn’t always possible to go back and capture the exact feeling of that original moment of seeing.

ES: Did you have an influential photography mentor or teacher? What was their biggest impact on you?

KP: While I was at Montana State University I was able to learn from the amazing Christiana Z. Anderson. She hadn’t yet gone to get her MFA and she was in this time of intense making (and likely still is). She was/is one of the most driven artists I have ever known. I remember some of us being at dinner at her house (we had formed a photography student club and we went to her house to see her studio space). We were all around a table and someone asked, “How do you get so much done?!!” to which she replied, “You know all those 5 and 10 minute chunks of time where you do nothing? I just use all those minutes and choose to do something.” As college student, I thought that sounded very doable. She wasn’t afraid to try something new and to push us to try so many experimental processes. I think this made trying new things after that course less intimidating, as some of the most beautiful things that came out of our time with her were often our mistakes. She taught us that the things left to chance can end up creating something exciting and beautiful. This had a lasting effect on me as an artist and likely on how I teach my students.

©Kristen Pless, Chromogenic prints from the project, Waiting in the Quiet

©Kristen Pless, Chromogenic prints from the project, Waiting in the Quiet

ES: How and where do you find inspiration?

KP: I have always found inspiration in returning home. The older I get, the more I feel the desire to make work when I am back at the farm. There is one highway, in particular, that almost every time I drive on it, I find I want to make a picture. I don’t know if it is the highway, per say, or if there is something meditative about driving roads that we know so well. I know I have called my dad more than once, telling him about the photo I would take in that moment if I only had the proper camera with me, or if I didn’t have a sleeping toddler in the car. I remember one time when my kids were very little (like 6 months old and a toddler) that by the time I got to my parents house at the farm, I quickly shuttled the kids into my mom’s arms and called to my dad to join me to go back and attempt to photograph all the images I had already made in my mind during the last leg of the drive.

ES: What has been your biggest sacrifice?

KP: That’s a tough question—but I think choosing to stay in a place we love (near Lake Superior) with a term contract, rather than chasing a tenure-track position, has been a career sacrifice. However, that big lake has a way of drawing you in, and in terms of quality of life and raising a family, it’s quite the opposite of a sacrifice. We love it here.

That said, not being tenured does sometimes make it harder to find time for my own work and comes with its own set of challenges.

©Kristen Pless, Platinum prints from the project, The Space Around You

©Kristen Pless, Platinum prints from the project, The Space Around You

From Kristen’s students,
Where some teachers approach their role as one of delivering dogma and direction, Kristen diverged. She asked lots of questions. Rarely did we speak of answers. Rather than work towards a static achievement, she behaved more like a friend or peer, pushing us towards a depth of thought  — and of self — as we worked through unearthing our identity as photographers and artists, and what exactly we were hoping to communicate.
Dane Pederson, danemakes.com, IG: @danemakes

©Dane Pederson, from the project Love or the Lack of It

©Dane Pederson, from the project Love or the Lack of It

©Dane Pederson, from the project Love or the Lack of It

Kristen Pless was the most influential professor and mentor I had during my degree—her deep knowledge across photography and lighting truly shaped who I am as an artist today. Her lighting class was the perfect balance between technical skill and creative freedom, encouraging experimentation and helping us understand what truly makes lighting so important. Kristen’s approachable nature, combined with her dedication to her own artistic practice, inspired me to create work that felt authentically mine. Kristen photographs beautiful landscapes and catches moments in time within nature. I remember when she produced her Monarch Reserves body of work and seeing the images for the first time and realizing she was still going out in the world and producing her own personal projects. She continued to push herself to document within fleeting moments. Kristen is the kind of teacher every student deserves: supportive, inspiring, and genuinely invested in her students’ growth.
Alyssa Justice, alyssajustice.com, IG: @alyssajusticephoto

©Alyssa Justice

©Alyssa Justice

©Alyssa Justice

About Kristen
Kristen Pless photographs landscapes, combining historic and contemporary processes to create her own sense of ethereal space. Pless’ work has been exhibited nationally. Pless was raised on a farm near Redwood Falls, Minnesota. She received her BA from Montana State University in 2004 and received her MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in May 2007. She currently lives in Two Harbors, MN and has taught photography at the University of Minnesota Duluth since 2009.
Website: kristenpless.com

Elizabeth Stone is a Montana-based visual artist exploring potent themes of memory and time deeply rooted within the ambiguity of photography. Stone’s work has been exhibited and is held in collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ, Cassilhaus, Chapel Hill, NC, Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT, Candela Collection, Richmond, VA, Archive 192, NYC, NY and the Nevada Museum of Art Special Collections Library, Reno, NV. Fellowships include Cassilhaus, Ucross Foundation, Willapa Bay AIR, Jentel Arts, the National Park Service and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts through the Montana Fellowship award from the LEAW Foundation. Process drives Stone’s work as she continues to push and pull at the edge of what defines and how we see the photograph.
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