Photographer Maite Klein has been exploring the world through the lens of a camera for over 30 years. Born in Madrid  and raised in Spain, the United States and Bolivia, she has traveled to Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Tunisia, Mexico, Canada and Cuba.

Using both digital and film formats, Maite’s work looks at the world with a sense of irony, humanity and humor. She is drawn to the concept of Social Realism, creating a kind of visual poetry about the world around us. Maite’s photos beckon the viewer into an illusive, captured moment of reality, while her portrait work seeks to draw out the unique personalities of her subjects.

She attributes her early photographic influences to her father who was an anthropologist, photographer and amateur classical guitarist.

Later influences include 1930’s and 40’s Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans; Robert Frank from the 1950’s and others who used photography as social documentary, as well as notable portrait photographers such as Yousuf Karsh, Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz. The work of these artists inpires by their tremendous ability to tell a story about the subject of their photography.

Maite has created her Faces of Spain collection to exhibit images of her birthplace, highlighting the country’s people, history and traditions, while at the same time exploring the evolution of its culture as current events and issues such as immigration and globalization exert their influence.

In her most recent exhibit, Focus on Flamenco, she calls on her personal experience in music and dance to convey the vitality and emotion of the art of flamenco. The images for this exhibit were predominantly shot on film, in live performance in the San Francisco Bay Area, using available light.

Maite Klein currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, noted flamenco and classical guitarist Mark Taylor. Her photography has been seen at various juried shows, exhibitions and on several CD covers. She also does publicity photos for Bay Area musicians and dancers.