For more than 15 years, Kimberly Schneider has built her practice around the handmade photographic print — an uncommon commitment in a field that has largely migrated to screens. Her work, featured in the series The Female Gaze: Kimberly Schneider – Uncovering the Ineffable on LENSCRATCH, spans true infrared film, spiritual landscapes, and experimental photograms and lumens.

The feature places Schneider within a conversation about cameraless and alternative-process photography that has regained institutional momentum over the past decade. Her chosen methods are demanding. True infrared film — a stock that renders foliage in luminous white and skies in near-black — is notoriously unpredictable to expose and develop. Lumens and photograms bypass the camera entirely, relying on contact printing, light and chemical intervention on paper.

The results, as the series title suggests, aim at what Schneider calls the ineffable. Her spiritual landscapes, made along the California coast — the feature's lead image was made at Windansea Beach in La Jolla — sit in a lineage that runs from early pictorialism through the California tradition of photographic mysticism. The infrared palette in particular transforms familiar shoreline terrain into something otherworldly.

Who is Kimberly Schneider?

Schneider holds a BFA in photography with a minor in philosophy from Colorado State University. That philosophical grounding is visible in her project framing: her work treats photography less as description than as inquiry into what lies beyond straightforward representation.

Her exhibition record includes the Center for Photographic Art (CPA) in Carmel, California — an institution with a long history of supporting West Coast fine-art photography. The LENSCRATCH feature, part of its ongoing Female Gaze series, situates her among women photographers working in alternative and cameraless processes.

What does the handmade print offer?

Schneider's insistence on the physical print carries weight at a moment when photographic circulation is overwhelmingly digital. Each lumen and photogram is a singular object — the paper itself is the site of the image, not a reproduction of a file. Infrared film, likewise, depends on hand-processing decisions that no scanner can replicate after the fact.

The Female Gaze series on LENSCRATCH continues to profile women whose practices resist the streamlined, gear-driven model of contemporary photography. Schneider's appearance in it signals growing editorial attention to process-driven, materially grounded work.

Readers can view the full feature, including the Windansea Beach series, on LENSCRATCH under The Female Gaze: Kimberly Schneider – Uncovering the Ineffable.