Nina Welch-Kling is a conceptual street photographer based in New York City. Rooted in a background in architecture and design, her work combines a practice of exploring the city, observing people, and responding intuitively to what catches her eye. Her point of departure is always a candid photograph. Through pairing and sequencing, she finds connections between otherwise unrelated moments, creating new relationships and narratives that reflect her way of seeing the world.
Her ongoing series Duologues and Rallentando explore different ways of seeing and interpreting the city. Duologues pairs unrelated photographs through connections in gestures, shapes, colors, and symbols, while Rallentando transforms fleeting and peripheral glimpses of pedestrians into impressions shaped by movement, color, gesture, and blur.
Born in southern Germany, Welch-Kling holds a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Architecture from UCLA. She has lived in New York since 1995.
Her monograph Duologues was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2022, and her work appears in Now is Now New York, forthcoming from teNeues in October 2026. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and published in LensCulture, Elle, Schwarzweiss Magazin, The Guardian, British Journal of Photography, and Dazed. She teaches workshops and mentors photographers privately.
2026 LensCulture Photography Award, Finalist
2025 PhotoLondon, London, Group Exhibition
2025 LensCulture Photography Award, Finalist
2025 VHS Gallery, Stuttgart, Solo Exhibition
2024 Kunsthalle Schweinfurt, Solo Exhibition
2022 Duologues, Monograph, Kehrer Verlag
2021 Hasselblad Heroine
2020 LensCulture Critics' Choice Award, Winner
2020 LensCulture Photography Award, Finalist
Two pictures become one in our mind's process of seeing. Picture magnetism pulls and holds particular images together; they lock together, like the word pieces of poems, on the surface, below the surface, deep inside in that somewhere that is uniquely photographic.
JEFF MERMELSTEIN,
from Duologues
I walk the streets observing people and responding intuitively to what catches my eye: a gesture, a color, a shape, or an unexpected moment. I photograph spontaneously, without knowing where an image might eventually lead. Later, in the editing process, I return to these photographs and look for connections between otherwise unrelated moments. This is where Duologues begins.
ESSAY BY GULNARA LYABIB SAMOILOVA
DUOLOGUES*, published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2022
We’ve inherited the idea of a female gaze as a reactionary counterpoint to the male gaze, which has dominated Western culture from the start. But perhaps we would benefit from discarding this paradigm altogether and embracing the vast cosmos of women and femmes alike. For centuries, women were relegated to the realm of the anonymous, as Virginia Woolf famously remarked, and it is only in recent years that we've begun to center and elevate them by name. As the founder of Women Street Photography, I am focused on bringing the work of women into view so that we can finally begin to understand the vast scope of our approach beyond the narrow confines of gender alone. I travel the globe creating Inclusive spaces for the exchange of ideas and meeting extraordinary artists like Nina Welch-Kling, who simultaneously honors the traditions of street photography while transforming it. Like Helen Levitt, Nina’s work is deceptively simple to anyone who has never tried to catch lightning in a bottle. But the best photography is always so. The longer you look at Nina’s work, the more complex it becomes, drawing you deeper into the mystery and magic of the everyday. The street, perhaps the most pedestrian, democratic, and accessible place on earth, is a marvelous mix of the mystical and the mundane, swirling in our midst while hiding in plain sight.
* duologue: a play or part of a play with speaking roles for only two actors
Gulnara Lyabib Samoilova is a Tatar-born American photographer and founder of Womenstreetphotographers
Available for print sales, presentations, and private mentoring