Anne Berry (anne.ellis.berry@gmail.com)

I grew up in Atlanta, graduating from The Lovett School. I studied art, literature, and horseback riding at Sweet Briar College and earned a masters degree in literature from the University of Georgia while also studying photography and horse science. My photographs are nationally exhibited in both private and corporate collections and have been included in exhibitions at the Denver International Airport, The Center for Fine Art Photography, New Orleans Photo Alliance, Soho Photo Gallery, and the Atlanta Photography Group Gallery at the Tula Arts Center.

Two passions in my life inspire the content of my photographs: animals and literature. I studied art, literature, and horseback riding at Sweet Briar College and earned a Masters degree in literature from the University of Georgia while also studying photography and horse science. I do not live on a farm or ride horses now, so instead I create my own menagerie of animal photographs. When I photograph animals I use the patience and understanding of animal behavior that I developed studying horseback riding and animal science. I want people to feel empathy for animals, and I attempt to draw the viewer into the image with a quality of mystery, what the French pictorial photographer Robert Demachy describes as “something all important, extremely difficult to express in words. If you can see it there is no use in trying to describe it. If you do not it is useless also, for you would not understand” (On the Straight Print)

Besides the feelings I have for the animals themselves, the inspirations for my photographs come from literature. For example, three romantic values are central to my vision: worship of nature, reliance on imagination rather than reason, and the idea of a realm that transcends the physical. John Keats voices in a poem what I consider an essential aspect of my photography: “Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard/Are sweeter” (Ode on a Grecian Urn)

Another concept that is central to my vision is T. S. Eliot’s metaphor of the Wasteland. The idea of the city as a place where people wander as shadows, having lost touch with nature and myth is key; it’s the other side of what I portray in my photographs. Van Gogh said, “there is no blue without yellow and without orange;” everything has an opposite, and the unstated is often more important than what is said. Animals remind the viewer that there is a natural world, and they provoke feelings of nostalgia for a green environment where humans and animals are connected.