THE GENTLE FRAME - SCENES OF A MOVING CITY

To understand Kelly Sommer’s work, you must first understand her way of seeing. Her photographs do not shout; they whisper. They reveal a city not as a monument, but as an ecosystem, alive, layered, unpredictable, and deeply human.

Her images move between two worlds: the architectural and the emotional.

In her architectural work, Kelly gravitates toward structure and rhythm. She captures buildings the way a musician captures chords, aligned, balanced, repeating.

Her photographs of facades and staircases reveal her early connection to shape and order. Windows glow like measured beats; fire escapes zigzag with a quiet electricity; reflections transform the familiar into something cinematic. These images show her instinct for geometry, her ability to extract harmony from urban density.

When she turns to people, her work loosens, breathing with a gentler openness. Kelly does not chase spectacle or chaos. Instead, she waits for gestures: the tilt of a head,

the pause in a stride, the moment when someone’s face softens into an expression that would otherwise evaporate into the crowd. Even in her more dramatic or sharply

contrasted images, she does not photograph to provoke.

She photographs to observe. This duality is her signature. A city rendered through

structure, and people rendered through empathy.

Her street photography frequently embraces reflections, puddles after the rain, polished surfaces, windows that fold one world into another. These reflections give her

images a dreamlike quality, as if the city is both above and below, solid and liquid, real and imagined. She experiments freely, sometimes improvising with what the street gives her, sometimes intentionally seeking a new angle. Her willingness to try “anything,” as she says, is what allows her photographs to feel both spontaneous and

carefully composed.

Trains and train stations recur across her portfolio not only as visual anchors but as emotional landscapes. She is drawn to them because they are never the same twice.

Light changes. Seasons shift. Faces come and go. A platform becomes a stage where stories intersect for only a few seconds, and Kelly captures that uncertainty, that

movement, that constant change.

Even in night scenes, she avoids the heavy-handed noir aesthetics, instead, she brings warmth, softness, and a touch of melancholy.

In black and white, her work becomes even more distilled. Lines strengthen. Faces deepen. And yet, even here, she avoids harshness. Her grayscale is tender, attentive,

human.

What makes Kelly’s work compelling is not only what she photographs, but how she approaches her subjects, people, buildings, reflections, trains, with humility and

curiosity. She does not impose drama. She does not seek extremes. She seeks the reality of the moment captured.

Her style remains fluid, evolving with each weekend she walks through Chicago’s streets. But its core is already unmistakable: sensitivity, stillness and dignity.

Kelly Sommer’s photographs remind us that art is not always found in extraordinary events. Sometimes, it is found in the echo of footsteps beneath an elevated train,

or the reflection of neon lights on wet pavement, waiting for the next moment to unfold.