About

Mary Beth Willis is an American photographer (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 researching the life and work of the photographer Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Taylor, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. She is also writing a Pocket Guide to Play. Mary Beth uses an old Rolleiflex T film camera and an old Kodak Brownie Hawkeye film camera as part of her practice play. (Let’s be honest and call it what it is.) She is 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, migration, and the erosion of our ability to play and be oneself and how this erosion coincides with the erosion of the land we inhabit. The land close to the water’s edge.