Ms. King in Focus

When some people hear the word “job,” a wave of disgust hits them. Get up, get dressed and drive to someplace where getting paid so little costs you your own happiness. Then again, there are cases, like Ms. King’s, where the exact opposite takes place.

Born and raised in Miami, Ms. Katherine King, a photography teacher at Miami Palmetto Senior High School (MPSH) is young, bright and warm hearted. Ms. King continues to build close relationships with her students and generally makes her class amongst the few “fun” classes, according to many students.

“Ms. King is one of my favorite teachers because she interacts with her students like they are her equals, and she isn’t condescending or acts as if they have nothing of value to say,” junior Elly Schnau said.

Ms. King discovered her first instance of pure passion for the camera in her sophomore year at Felix Varela Senior High School. She began her photography journey at age 16 and continued until her high school graduation. Next came college and big decisions at Florida International University (FIU), along with a great hardship that truly put her life in perspective.

“My major was fine arts, and what they make you do is to choose a concentration so the majority of what your studio classes will be your concentration and then you take a bunch of other studio classes but my concentration was photography,” Ms. King said.

King was assigned various projects throughout her photography studio classes at FIU. Her photography series’ ranged from silly to serious, based on her circumstances. As her love for photography grew, Ms. King’s mother went through seven years of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with cancer.

“My projects would be closely related to what I was going through. For example, when I was in a really good place, I would do really silly projects and when my mom was going through cancer, I documented more serious projects,” Ms. King said. “Sometimes when I didn’t know what to do, I would do self-portraits because it’s the one thing that you always have access to: it’s you.”

Ms. King began basing her assigned projects on her mother and her struggles around the same time her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She documented everything her mother did to fully capture those moments.

“There was one project I did on my mom when she first started [chemotherapy] and I would follow her around to her doctor appointments and around the house to basically document what she was going through,” Ms. King said.

Now that her mom is healthy, Ms. King tells her story of hardship through the photographs she took, as one of her college projects. Although she focused her college years on photography, she did not initially want to become a photography teacher. King began working at Fox Mar shortly after graduating and quickly realized the job dissatisfied her.

“My previous job before teaching was one of those jobs you go to and you kind of dread and then you keep looking forward to the clock to get out and you go home and sleep and then you have to go to work again and it was a miserable routine but now I love [my job],” Ms. King said. “Although it sucks to wake up so early, I’m over it by the time I have my coffee and I’m happy.”

When Ms. King finally decided to change her career, everything slowly pieced together, with the help of her FIU photography professor, and a job offer from MPSH.

She now uses her resources as a teacher to continue her passion with the camera, typically through the lenses of a Pentax K-1000 (the same camera that students use in the class), to inspire her students and their work.

“I wanted to do something with art. It was always about art and I somewhat recently decided to become a teacher,” Ms. King said. “I was in a job that I didn’t enjoy so I had to think of what would make me happy and discovered that I would really enjoy to inspire or help mold young artists’ minds like the photography and art teacher that I had looked up to in my high school experience. I just want to keep it going.”