This week I am featuring work that I encountered at Review LA, either in a review or at the Portfolio Walk.

Linda Morrow knows how to take beautiful photographs. Her series, Echoes of Ovid, taps into those moody and lovely images that came out of the Pictorialism movement, and yet, the images still feel modern with the hint contemporary influences. If you are not familiar with this Greek tale, Echoes of Ovid is the story of Daphne who, pursued by an unwanted lover, calls out in desperation to her father, the god Peneus. In order to rescue her, he promptly changes her into a tree, the lovely laurel tree, to be exact. It’s a series about is about imagination, transformation and myth.

Many images in the collection refer to Ovid’s stories on some level, revealing a blurred line between the botanical and the feminine, and inviting a kind of interplay between the natural world and the human form.

A retired college English professor, Linda has embraced her photography with a lifetime of words–novels and stories and poems that will surely find their way into images. As a child growing up on our family’s ranch in Arizona, I spent long hours alone, studying the landscape and using my imagination to amuse myself. It likely made a mark on me that lead to my interest in photography, an interest that blossomed in 1994 in a darkroom workshop at Ghost Ranch down the road from Georgia O’Keefe’s former home in New Mexico. From that point on, photography became a serious pursuit and a priority.