Ann W. Olson

Ann W. Olson, this issue's featured artist, would much rather smell the freshly mown hay of a neighbor's field than the headache-inducing chemicals of a darkroom. A photographer and writer from the forests and fields of northeastern Kentucky, her work imparts her deeply familiar communication with the beauty, heritage, and community of her natural surroundings.

In 1993, Olson illustrated A Wordful Child, an autobiography for children by George Ella Lyon, and then, in 1998, Counting on the Woods, a picture book poem also by Lyon. This book features photographs from her own backyard in Elliott County, Kentucky. Olson's work can be found in Missing Mountains, a project guided by Wendell Berry and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (kftc) protesting what she calls the "abhorrent practice of mountaintop removal mining."

Olson's richly-colored photographs bear witness to nature and movement. On her website (annwolson.com), she remarks that photographers continually concern themselves with "how change happens." She refuses to arbitrarily manipulate her photographs. She approaches photography in much the same way as George Ella Lyon approaches writing: as a form of honest revelation.

I have learned the reward of looking more intensely at things. What strikes me in the close looking is how much stuff changes that we don't usually realize is changing. This is clearest in nature, with flowers blooming and fading, buildings being replaced or added on to, floods and fire, but also with people getting older or experiencing different moods. I have learned I have to photograph something now because it just might not be there next time.

Professionally, she has worked for development, public relations, and as a French instructor at Morehead State University. She has been a bookstore clerk, freelance photographer, and presenter in schools. Her home of thirty-five years sits on one hundred hilly acres, down her own gravel road, near where she lived as a vista volunteer.

Olson would like to convey her deep gratitude to George Ella Lyon for her response to and appreciation of her art. Both women are members of a small writers' group that meets regularly in Lexington, Kentucky.