Cath Simard

Cath Simard is a Canadian landscape photographer based in Calgary, Alberta. She spent close to ten years in fashion, first as a model and later as a stylist and art director, before leaving for Australia in 2014. There, photos she took on an iPhone caught the eye of a brand, and the shoot that followed paid for her first camera. She came back to Canada in 2016 and soon began making composites: a single picture pieced together from shots gathered at separate times and places, usually on long solo hikes and climbs in the mountains. Her images lean toward cold blue light, night skies and high peaks, and she releases only a few each year.

A photograph she took of a road on Oahu in 2017 spread across social media, mostly without her name on it. In September 2021 she minted it as #FreeHawaiiPhoto, a single NFT that the collector gmoney won at auction, and the sale made the image free for anyone to use. Earlier that year her first NFT drop, Lumière du Noir, had included LE DÉPART, which came with a five-day trip with her to Spirit Island in the Canadian Rockies.

In 2022 Sotheby's auctioned her print Continuum together with an NFT, and Christie's offered Les parts du Soi, a composite of 28 photographs taken over three weeks in Patagonia, in its Next Wave: The Miami Edit sale. She made Liminal State with Ryan Koopmans, and took on From Nowhere to Somewhere, a commission based on an AI image its collector made, which she finished as The Somewhere after a trip to China. Her practice now centres on fine art prints and commissions.