Redesign

I spent much of this week redesigning my website (https://www.kathryndezur.com if you’d care to look). It’s an interesting thing, changing your self-presentation to the world and thinking about how that presentation reflects the redesign of yourself—by yourself, but also by time and events outside of your control.

New Website Landing Page, July 2025

Some of the changes to the website are simple. Some of the changes are complicated: I’ve added a photography portfolio broken up into three categories, each with their own page. This replaces the single page that featured a collection of good-but-sort-of-random photos in a format I found hard to update with new work. So, in the end, the new version will be easier for both the viewer and for me.

But that’s not the reason I did it. I did it because I’m taking myself more seriously as a photographer, as an artist with a camera. I’m finally ready after a decade of practice to say that I can do portrait sessions for random strangers for money, that my work counts as art that someone might actively want on their walls.

I’m not quite sure what the tipping point was. I’ve done juried art fairs and juried exhibitions for a handful of years. I’ve even won “best photography” in most of them. I’ve taken author photos for three friends who have a) paid me for them and b) actually used them for their books and websites. Like, they actually used them. It wasn’t just a case of “oh, I’ll hire her because she’s a friend and that will make her feel good and then I’ll probably have other ones taken too.” Still, all that reinforcement wasn’t enough.

Maybe it was my declaration in my therapist’s office earlier this year when discussing possibilities for my post-retirement era: I don’t want to work another regular job. I’m an artist now. I’m a fucking artist.

I didn’t say “photographer.” I didn’t say “writer.” I didn’t say “poet.” I said “artist,” which encompasses them all. I owned it. So, I changed the heading on my landing page—“Writer. Editor. Teacher. Photographer”—to the largest possible font instead of the smallest font. Taking up the space.

My redesign is not about making something happen (well, okay, it is because I’m hoping that tourists and locals who see my work in various shows this summer will hire or buy from me), but rather about reflecting what already is true.

In the past, I’ve always associated redesign with improvement, especially the endless hamster wheel of self-improvement: I must redesign my life so that I can be better. More. Whole. I must wake earlier, exercise daily, eat vegetables, write more, grade faster, read more, mentor with more heart, regulate my moods, my hormones, my CPTSD. My life philosophy could have been taken straight from The Six Million Dollar Man (which, along with Bionic Woman, I watched a ton of in the 1970s): “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him…Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.” I always suspected that I needed to redesign and rebuild myself to be somehow adequate. To be fair, a lot of that comes from living in a consumer-capitalist system, with its emphasis on constant productivity, and from experiencing the double-bind of cultural expectations for women to boot.

This feels different. Maybe this is the promised freedom of middle-age and menopause. We get to join the We Do Not Care Club.¹ I wish I had done it sooner. My membership allows what I really do care about to shine through.

1. ·The We Do Not Care Club/Movement for perimenopausal and menopausal women is an Instagram and Threads phenomenon founded by Melani Sanders (@justbeingmelani) that boasts 1.2M followers with views of specific videos numbering between approximately 6K to 17M. In other words, this lands for lots of us.