About

Mary Beth Willis is an American photographer and scribbler (Miami 1976) who has lived in England for twenty years. She is a self-taught photographer, who learned to focus her lens by capturing her daughters and the flowers growing in her garden and by the wayside in England. 

She is currently researching the life and work of the photographer Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Taylor, at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. Mary Beth uses an old Rolleiflex T film camera and her grandfather’s Kodak Brownie Hawkeye film camera as part of her practice play (let’s be honest and call it what it is).

Between taking photographs and raising a family she is also writing a Commonplace Pocket Guide to Play. She is also currently curating a collection of Dorothea Lange’s work and creating her own work Panacea based in North Florida and Southern Georgia, the sparsely populated part of the American South where she spent her childhood. 

Her photographs and writing consider themes of home, family and migration. The erosion of our ability to play and be oneself in the digital age, how we can combat this erosion and live contented creative lives that resemble, reflect and reveal the fullness found in each and every human life.