ABOUT
BIOGRAPHY
Jane Liechty is a fine art photographer who lives in State College, Pennsylvania She is from Sheffield, England. In her early years, she earned a music degree from The University of Birmingham and a teaching certificate from The University of Cambridge. While in Cambridge, she met and married John; they moved to the United States, where she spent much time and energy raising a family. Now that the children are grown, she has turned to photography.
Jane studies photography at Pennsylvania State University and will graduate with a Bachelor of Design in Professional Photography in December 2024. In 2021, she received the Leslie P. Greenhill scholarship – an award that recognizes students with a serious involvement in and commitment to photography.
During 2022-23, Jane lived in Cambridge, England, where she completed two large-scale photography projects. The first project tells of her personal experience in Cambridge, and the second, London-opoly, is a visit to the properties on London’s Monopoly gameboard. Both projects will be published as books. Her current project is a wander about quintessential small-town Pennsylvania, in search of the Beautiful and the True.
Jane has exhibited work at the Zoller and Keller galleries at Penn State University and Schlow Library in State College as part of the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts Juried Exhibition. Her first solo show will be at the Bellefonte Art Museum in August 2024.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
I am a photographer. I think in terms of photographs. I photograph what is between people and among them, and the things that they create. I look for shape and shadow, color and connection, but mostly, I look at how people move through the world. For me, people make a place; human connection is vital. Often, I stop and talk with the people I photograph.
Form is important: I seek composition. Composition is an ideal alignment of Beauty and Truth. Beauty reveals structure; without organization, life is chaos; Beauty pushes aside the negative and neutral. Truth gives meaning to life; more than fact, it’s the reason and the real. I reach for these ideals, striving to overcome the disconnect that, of necessity, exists in all of art. Often, I am still. Creation is intuitive; I only know it when it happens.
Photographs simplify the world. I like their neat boundaries and how they abstract and package life. Reality exists outside a photograph’s frame and flatness. Like a model, it approximates the world. The more photographs align with Beauty and Truth, the better they explain life. This is the purpose of my work, and what I hope, in the end, to understand.