Baby Portraits By Evan Kafka

After high school, Kafka attended an electronics trade school and fixed hardware for the Associated Press in Washington D.C. upon graduation. During his three years in that job, he got into photography as a hobby. Luckily, his department was close to the photography department, and he developed a comraderie with the shooters there. Kafka picked up all he could from the AP shooters, and eventually left to go to college.
While at R.I.T. Kafka undertook newspaper internships, and thought he might become a newspaper photographer. In his last year he gravitated toward magazine work, and studied increasingly under the advertising program to learn about lighting and large format photography.
Kafka graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1995, and headed directly to New York City afterwards. He began assisting, which only lasted six months. Working as a photojournalist, he began getting reportage assignments and documentary style weddings before they were all the rage. Those two styles afforded him enough money to stop assisting, “before I got to learn anything,” he adds, laughing. Not having a mentor’s style heavily imprinted on his own work is one of the benefits of assisting for a short time.