John Ellert

I have been photographing the natural world ever since I first picked up a Brownie camera at age 14. Since then, photography has been a passion, a journey within as well as without. As a photographer, I have been places I would never otherwise have visited, and the practice of my art has led to deep friendships with other photographers, deeper than almost all other friendships in my life.

Place inimitably shapes who we are, and the many places I have lived and visited informs and expands both mind and work. I spent my childhood in western Michigan, lived briefly in the San Francisco Bay area, came of age in the Colorado Rockies, and have lived the most recent half of my life amidst the visual vastness of the Great Plains. I have also lived in Germany, Montana, Virginia, and Illinois. My travels have taken me numerous times to Europe as well as to Africa, South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada. Part of each of these places inhabits my soul.

After photographing wildlife almost exclusively for a number of years, now my creative work concentrates on landscapes and flowers, through which I seek to draw the viewer into the immediacy of a moment in time and to transport them to the essence of a physical place they may never have visited in person.

I am a proponent of non-representational photography in which the photographic artist avoids portraying his subject in the most realistic way possible using the sharp lines and clearly delineated shapes of traditional photography. Through my training with Nancy Rotenberg, André Gallant, and Freeman Patterson I have developed great interest in how the mind reconstructs the visual field, filling in selectively from the information presented by the eyes. Thus, I find my work revolves around understanding rather than seeing, and my best work engages nature as intrinsically artistic rather than as an external subject.