Meet Emily Fisher | photographer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Emily Fisher and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Emily, maybe we can start at the very start – the idea – how did you come up with the idea for your business?
Since I was a child, I’d always been interested in art and was even an art major in college. However, after college I began working with other people’s art, rather than creating my own. I worked in art museums, galleries and auction houses. I went back to school to get my master’s in Arts Administration at NYU while I worked fulltime at Christie’s Auction House. I felt fulfilled working around art and loved my time at Christie’s.

When I got married, I quit my job, had my first child and began taking lots of pictures of her. What started as an attempt to record my daughter’s childhood, turned into a passion and eventually a career. I had my identical twin boys 4 years later and it was at this point when I started to get serious about photography.

I entered my first juried photography show at the local library and to my surprise my image was not only accepted, it won first place. This gave me great confidence and made me realize I was onto something. Up until this point, I was only taking pictures with my iPhone and posting them on Instagram. When I was announced as the winner of the juried show and people came up to me asking what camera I shot with, I was embarrassed to say it was my phone. In that moment, I vowed to learn to use a DSLR camera and to edit using Lightroom and Photoshop rather than Instagram filters.

In the years since, I achieved those goals by taking classes at ICP (International Center for Photography) in NYC. The quality of my work improved, I began to sell prints and get jobs and my business was born. I have won several awards and have been featured and published in several publications and even had one of my images on a billboard in NYC last summer! I am seeing real income doing what I love and have set new, more ambitious goals for myself as a professional photographer.


Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
It’s incredible—when you think of the millions of photographers who have come before me and those who are working now—that I can create an image that has never existed before. Art (music, writing, dance, etc) is amazing that way; that there’s always room to create something original and powerful. I love to imagine my images living on, long after I’m gone. This past summer, I won the Global Billboard Project competition and had one of my images on a billboard in New York City. I was very proud to see an image I’d created on a billboard in one of the most important cities in the world. I also wrote an article, illustrated by my photographs, entitled “American Roadschool” which was published in several magazines. It was an account of a 3-month RV trip my family and I took across the United States during the covid pandemic. There is something very satisfying and official feeling when I see my work featured in a public arena like that.

A recurrent theme in my work is the relationship between humans and the natural world. My portraits and landscapes often reflect a sense of timelessness. I typically juxtapose solitary figures with an almost overwhelming landscape to suggest the environment as being active and significant in both the composition and concept of the image. The use of the landscape in this way creates meaning and mood in photographs, aspects that are also explored via pose and atmosphere. There is a deliberate stripping down and essentializing of forms to highlight the relationship between people and place. My roles as mother, wife, artist and environmentalist inform my work. I am acutely aware of the precarious nature of our shifting environment, of the fragility of life and the ephemerality of childhood and I use my photographs to express this sensibility.

Many of my photographs have a painterly quality which elevates the questioning of surface, medium and artifice. I studied art and art history in college and then worked in the art world for many years (in galleries, museums and auction houses) so I am informed by classical portraiture in the style of Vermeer in terms of the dramatic use of light. I grew up in the Brandywine Valley in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, so I was well-acquainted with the work of painter Andrew Wyeth, and as I have grown as an artist, I’m continually drawn to his evocative portraits and landscapes. There is a nostalgic mood to his work, not a warm and fuzzy nostalgia, but a lonely, isolated feeling that moves me. Another artist for whom I have a strong affinity is Sally Mann. Her photographs of landscapes and portraits also evoke a sense of timelessness and nostalgia that I try to capture in my own work. She has said, “I like to make people feel a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to think about who they are and why they think the way they do.” Similarly, I try to create tension between the classic sense of proportion and symmetry, the carefully orchestrated compositions, and the unsettling nature of expressionless children, a snake running across a young child’s face, a child holding a skull or standing in a barren landscape.

A lesson I’ve learned along the way is to not try to please an audience. My most successful work is work I make solely for myself. I can tell when I’ve made a good picture—it gives me almost a feeling of being high or euphoric—and those images end up being the most popular and successful.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I’d like to thank my talented mom for instilling in me a love of art. I’d also like to thank my incredibly supportive husband (and biggest cheerleader) for being the best assistant when called upon and for obliging all the times I asked to stop the car (or RV) to take pictures. And I’d like to give the biggest shoutout to my kids (my muses) for being so patient with my camera and me over the years. Thank you for taking the bribes, for tolerating the cold, sandstorms, snowstorms, scary heights, smelly fish and for repeating a pose or movement 100s of times until I got it just right. Thank you for agreeing to wear uncomfortable clothes or, even better, live animals (and their resulting excrement)–all in the name of art. Hopefully, you will feel that I have thoroughly and artfully documented your childhood.

Website: https://emilynevillefisher.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emilyfisherphoto/