Artifact Uprising

We are Artifact Uprising. We create joy by helping you honor the meaningful in your life through printed photo gifts, books, and more. With a focus on high quality and elevated design, we hope to make permanence of what matters most.

In 2004, as a recent college graduate, Co-Founder Jenna Walker found spending money was hard to come by. Her husband Matty was getting his elementary teaching license and they lived paycheck to paycheck, finding happiness camping almost every weekend. Rafting down the Green River that summer, a family of otters followed them for five days. Jenna struggled to get a good picture of them; she was determined to come home from that trip and learn how to use a real camera. However, funds were short–and saving for such a toy was going to take time.

Three days after this trip, Jenna told her father-in-law that she wanted to learn photography. The next day he found a camera sitting next to a dumpster in a shiny metal case–lenses and all. The abandoned camera — it turns out — had once belonged to a local hospital. No longer a part of their inventory, they said it was theirs to keep.

One year later, Jenna quit her job to become a professional photographer. Six months later her sister Katie and husband Matt joined her.

It's something we kept coming back to — ‘What are we leaving behind?’

Together they worked as professional photographers for 8 years — making permanence of experiences that move minds and hearts. As one click of the shutter turned to another turned to hundreds of thousands of photos, they realized their documented lives were sitting on phones and computers with no true place to live on. As Jenna explains: “It’s something we kept coming back to — what are we leaving behind?“

This question spiraled into experiments that included baking photo books in their oven and eventually into dreams of a photo book business.

Staying the Course

The three spent the next two years ideating, prototyping, failing and beginning again. They scrapped everything and started over. Again and again.

Somehow — with a kind of serendipity much like finding that first camera - doors opened where there might have otherwise been dead ends. They continued to create an authentic, creativity-driven business, knowing their choices needed to sit right in their hearts and with the wild places they love so much. And so they focused on creating products that were congruent with their beliefs - sourcing recycled papers for book pages and wood products made from locally-sourced fallen beetle-kill pine. They wanted to give good materials a second life.

Since that day, we've gone from a basement to our own office in downtown Denver – yet the roots remain the same. We pride ourselves on being an authentic company that stays true to its eco-conscious roots, and we think that matters. This is why we surround ourselves with people who challenge us to think differently and show up to do the hard work. We believe some of the best ideas are sparked outside the four corners of a desk and creativity requires that we get out and find connection away from our screens. At the end of the day, we want to build great things with great people.