Artist Statement

My earliest memories, at least the best ones, revolve around being out and about in the backwoods.   My family is from the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania; my sisters and I are the first generation out of the coalmines. 

My mother was, and still is, a great teacher.   I remember following her around the countryside, four little girls all walking in the same general direction.  While we walked, she named the wildlife and flowers we saw.  She taught us to respect those things, and to treat them with the care they deserved. (“Don’t pick them all sweetie, if we do there won’t be any to make seeds for next year...”)   She taught us their intrinsic value to the land around us and the ecosystem that sustained them, and us, way before anyone coined those terms.   But most of all she taught us to not just look but to see.

The summer before I turned six and started first grade, my parents had a visitor who brought something wondrous into my life. 

Usually we were sent out to play when there were visitors; but for some reason or another, the adults went outside instead, and they left his photographs on the kitchen table.  Some were boring pictures of adults I didn’t know and could care less about, but some were of wildlife and flowers the likes of which I had never seen before.

I was entranced.  This was not like the black and white sketches in our battered family encyclopedia, nor was it like the line drawings in my coloring books.  Not even the pictures in my golden books!  It was like the colored glass windows in church, real, but like a dream.  Some kind of magic plucked from the backwoods and captured on paper!

I spread them out on the table and was drinking them in when the man came back into the house and saw me.  I was afraid, at first, certain this was a forbidden fruit; but he was kind, and let me continue to look at them.  I asked him what the names of the animals and flowers were.  He told me and explained that he took the photographs with his camera.  He showed me how it worked, and then took me and my sister’s picture by my mom’s prize snowball bush.  As we gathered around him and watched that Polaroid picture develop I felt something changing deep inside me in the most profound way.  It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before.   I knew in that moment that someday I would have one of these cameras, and no one and nothing could hold me back from making this same kind of miracle.

Many years have passed since that summer’s day.  I grew up, got married, and had two beautiful children, Jenna and Michael - the lights of my life.  (Eventually I got divorced and became a single mother, but that's another story.) During those intervening years, I went to college (Penn State University) where I received a Bachelor of Arts degree with a Minor in Photography in 1983.

I guess I was right when I was five years old - nothing has stopped me.  I still feel that magic when I’m “shooting”.  I work with a beat up 35 year old Nikon and not a Polaroid; but the peace and solitude I find while traipsing in the backwoods restores my spirit, and the simplicity I find there inspires me.   Like our Native Americans I believe that life is a circle.  Like my mother before me I love to share it with others.  Anyone who wants to is welcome to come with me… into the backwoods.

LynnMarie