Tami Bone, Austin, Texas — Photographer

Images Copyright: Tami Bone, Austin, Texas-based photographer

Photographer Tami Bone has a big love for ordinary beauty and everyday humanity, as in the kind that doesn’t cost a penny, isn’t staged, and is often overlooked. She loves simple gesture and expression. Chance encounters with people she meets, as well as a love for the natural world, inspires much of her work. She finds that making intimate photographs comes from being open and engaged, and maybe more essentially, listening with her eyes as well as her ears. She believes her responsibility as an artist is to spark a sense of hope and wonder, and she aspires to do this by finding the grace and transcendence in a day to day world.

For her project, Swimmers, she has photographed children on a neighborhood summer swim team over a span of seven years. She began the project not intending to make a project, but to find connection in an unfamiliar environment. She was new to the neighborhood, and her children, young at the time, were new to being on a swim team. As the project took shape, she began asking about the why of photographing these children in this setting, other than for their inherent youthful beauty. Swimming as a sport was never the focus. She is drawn to what unfolds around the edges of the swimming, and to the ease that children have with moving in and out of one another’s space. To stand back and observe this movement is like watching a dance of tangled limbs and bodies in endless motion. The work is an exploration of this effortless and continuous coming together and pulling apart, and an observation of how children relate to one another through the sense of touch.

Tami lives in Austin, Texas and has pieced together an ongoing photographic education with classes, workshops and reading all she can on the art of photography. She pursues portraiture and commissions, as well as personal projects, always with the common thread of a big love for beauty in simplicity. She is influenced by many forms of photography, including vintage family photographs, and finds that rather than giving answers, they kindle more questions.

Images Copyright: Tami Bone,