I am Patty Maher and I’m a fine art photographer from Ontario, Canada. I moved to the countryside from the city about three years ago and I found myself very inspired by the beautiful landscapes that surrounded me. In the beginning I started off shooting those landscapes as they were, but after a while I found that I wanted to add in a human element – to tell stories through my photos.
My work is inspired by many different things: music, poetry, movies, or just a simple idea or emotion that comes to me. When I create a photo I usually start off with a simple idea and then see what emerges both while shooting and later in post processing. It’s important to me that people seeing my photos have their own engagement with them – so I don’t like to say too much about what the photo ‘means’ as I believe that the viewer will find their own meaning in what I do, which could be very different from what the photo means to me.
I don’t tend to show faces in my work because I think that makes the story more universal, and I believe it allows other people to identify with the photo more easily and write their own meaning into it.
