About Anne

The notoriously fickle maritime climate of the British Isles means Anne does not need to travel far to find the conditions that she regards as ideal for her style of photography.

“Mist, murk and bad weather. I love the world feeling like a giant soft box.”

It was in such weather one day in March 2017, while gazing at a partially submerged causeway at Weston Super Mare, that Anne framed the scene for the photograph that marked a turning point in her life. Against a background of flat grey mist, the evenly spaced fence posts of the Knightstone Island Causeway resemble black pegs on a washing line, their chain links hanging like threads of morning dew. Overhead, a solitary gull glides towards the centre of the picture, the only moving detail within a monochromatic study of static shapes and patterns.

In Anne’s words, the result “stopped me in my tracks. It changed everything.” From that moment, the solicitor with a PhD in physical chemistry decided to devote her life to photography.

But a new vocation requires more to sustain it than the passion sparked by an epiphanous moment. Anne knew she needed expert guidance, and a couple of months later asked the celebrated fine art photographer Jonathan Chritchley to be her mentor. It was an inspired choice. Chritchley is renowned for his exquisitely composed black and white prints depicting seascapes, sailing ships and all manner of water-themed subjects, while Anne’s life and interests have always been close to water too. Her childhood love of swimming was superseded by a passion for sculling on the Thames while at secondary school in London. Later, when she went to Oxford to read chemistry, she coxed and rowed competitively for Merton College and other university crews.

Anne claims not to know where her desire to create art comes from, saying she was never artistic, nor someone who regularly frequented galleries, but the answer surely lies on the surface of the ancient river that forever links Oxford to London. “I love the feel of the boat moving and the symmetry you get in the motion of a single scull,” she says. “When a boat sits up and runs on placid water it’s magical.”

Whether contemplating the surface of the Thames, an ebbing channel tide, or a misty lagoon at first light, Anne sees water as a painter might consider her canvas – but never as a blank sheet, instead water is a dynamic form to both enhance and complement the subject. Sometimes, the mood and shape of the water itself is enough to be cast as the main protagonist in her photograph.

To seek out the essence of shapes and tones, light and shade, Anne is not afraid to step back from the pale mist of the waterline and contemplate darker channels. In her mysterious printed waterworld, light needs the darkness to shine against, while any hint of subject movement is often cast as shadow. 


In many of her compositions, these lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men seem an appropriate description of both the mood and the moment:

Between the idea
And the reality,
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow

Of course, the art of photography does not finish with the motion of the shutter and seeing the image on a screen. Anne sees deliverance in the finished print. It is only then that the photography of Anne Latrémolière completes its transformation into art.