Photography by Scarlett

Scarlett's Biography

I was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, just 18 miles east of my hometown, Tallulah, Louisiana. Vicksburg, situated on high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, was the site of one of the decisive battles of the American Civil War. Tallulah is a nearby flatland Delta town, surrounded by some of the richest farmland in the United States. Being born in 1965, at the end of the centennial celebration and remembrance of that tragic civil war, how could Inot grow up but be shaped by history and memory and myth - and hence, my name Scarlett.

Like my namesake - and probably most Southerners - I was also shaped earlyin life by a strong sense of family and place, especially family stories and traditions in our hometown. I was early on drawn to photography as an art that could capture and express those feelings. I was inspired particularly by a beautiful photographic portrait of my paternal grandmother, taken in the late 1920s. My grandmother was the primary calming influence during my adolescence, and her portrait spoke to me of a world of familial connection that could also be aesthetically beautiful.

So...at an early age I developed my passion for what photography might offer: the possibility of capturing a moment of rare insight into someone's spirit and the environment that shaped them; the possibility of imaginatively traveling to a world beyond my small-town time and place; the possibility that even as generations came and went that a sense of family and the specific locale that shaped that family and their world, made vibrant by artful photography, might live on forever.

As much as photography spoke to my teen-age artistic soul, I had no sense as a young person that it could be a career, a profession. So in college in north Louisiana in the 1980s I studied pharmacy, a "practical" degree, and started life as a professional pharmacist. During the 1990s, in my late 20s, my background in chemistry helped provide a transition into photography, as my long-time passion for photography grew into a professional possibility. I apprenticed in the "old school" film tradition where I learned - from a series of  enthusiastic and committed amateurs in the local camera club - to love the magic of the darkroom, and I became obsessed with the transcendent tones of black and white photography in the work of my early heroes such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Ruth Bernard, and Imogen Cunningham. My youthful dreams about what photography might give the world crystallized into a personal philosophy about what I might accomplish as a professional fine art portrait photographer - so I whole-heartedly leapt into that world.

Over the past twenty-five years I have travelled widely to master my craft and broaden my art. From Russia to Peru, from France and Italy to Ireland, from New York to California, from Colorado and New Mexico to Oregon, I have taken master classes with some of the world's most creative photographic artists, including Mary Ellen Mark, Shana and Robert ParkHarrison, Joyce Tennyson, Josephine Sacabo, Jock Sturges, Keith Carter, Jennifer Thoresen, Joyce Wilson, and Maggie Taylor. Today, I shoot in digital, as well as in film, and love the variety of aesthetic possibilities that digital technology brings to fine art photography.

Regardless of what new and exciting technologies will come to photography, I am firmly committed to ever seeking -- and ever offering to lovers of photography -- that magical moment, that "decisive moment" that an artful photograph immortalizes, that singular moment in history that will never be again, except in memory as that particular artwork makes it live again.