About Libby Ellis

“Libby Ellis’s images of flowers look more like nineteenth-century etchings or the ink-brush paintings of some ancient Zen master. That’s in part because Ellis photographs her flowers in black and white, but also because she has managed to create an other-worldly look that is unique, loaded with emotion, and strangely comforting.

Ellis, a bubbly person in a butterfly face mask, grew up in the Midwest and California. She first moved to Martha’s Vineyard decades ago, quite literally after closing her eyes and pointing at a map. She says she chose to make her portraits of flowers in black and white because it allows her to focus more on the shapes, moods, forms, and feelings. 

“When you take away color, you can see things you might have otherwise missed,” she says. Ellis deliberately uses only the barest ingredients—an digital camera, a paper backdrop, natural light—without any manipulation by computer, “only flowers I meet growing in the earth.” She doesn’t even arrange them; she lets them arrange themselves.

Ellis denies she’s anything other than a vehicle—“I just follow the flowers,” she says—but the meditative relationship she develops with her subjects produces images that are more than decorative: they speak about life, in all its strange stages. In one of my favorites, a cosmos has gone soft and droopy like a funeral shroud, while its partner is open and alert, and unopened buds wait in the wings. At a time when mortality is heavy on our minds, these images remind us that the value of life is not all in youth and blooming. Looked at from the right angle, the most seemingly insignificant things have worth—even a wilted bloom or a gnarled seedpod. Libby Ellis’s flowers don’t judge or fear their own passing; they just do what they do, and it’s beautiful.”

—Nathaniel Reade

New England Home, 2021