For me, photography is a mode of storytelling; the story chooses the medium and the camera.
As a free-range kid, my feet were either in the ocean or making paths through the forests. It was only natural, when my father bought me a Cosina CT-1 35 mm SLR and some used black and white darkroom equipment for my thirteenth birthday, that my love of the outdoors and photography converged. The bathroom became our makeshift darkroom: the enlarger balanced on the toilet, the bathtub our sink line. Over the next fifteen years, I developed my photographic practice through self-education and part-time institutional training (community centre workshops, high school, Vancouver's Focal Point Photography with photographer Andrew Tripp, and Emily Carr College of Art and Design with photographic artists Chick Rice, Diane Evans, and Deborah Shackleton). I had had two solo shows, in White Rock and Vancouver, British Columbia, when I made a choice to put my photography on hold as I pursued post-secondary education. I hold a B.A. and M.A. in literature from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in literature from the University of Alberta. I returned to photography as I began my PhD, re-aligning my photography with my research and writing interests in environmental literary and visual arts. In my journeying back to photography, I co-founded and co-edited The Goose: A Journal in Arts, Literature, and Environment. In The Goose, you can find a selection of my work in nature and environmental documentary photography done over the course of a decade from 2005 to 2015 (www.alecc.ca and https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/).
My nature/documentary photographs of salt marshes have been featured in two group shows in Montreal, one with the Montreal Biosphere's outdoor exhibit Landscapes and Omens in 2016. In spring 2025, my image Peony in the Hand was selected for Apex, the group exhibit organized by SPAO: Photographic Arts Centre in Ottawa. At the completion of my PhD, I began attending summer workshops at Maine Media College, learning from environmental photographer Gary Braasch and photojournalist Thatcher Cook. However, there was an itch in my fingers. I missed the tactility of printmaking. It was at Maine Media that I discovered the range of alternative contact printing processes. I spent several summer workshops learning alternative processes with Brenton Hamilton, which led to my love settling on tri-colour gum bichromate. In my practice of fine art and documentary photography, I work with both digital and film and do other alt contact processes, such as cyanotype, salt, and platinum/palladium.
You will find my written published works under Lisa Szabo-Jones or Lisa Szabo. I've posted on my website two feature publications of my photography and writing.
I photograph primarily the natural world, though human actions and human made worlds equally fascinate me. Usually, my fascination for the latter emerges from observing how humans push the more-than-human world to the edges, and in doing so unwittingly push themselves to the edges of their own survival. These edges tend to be both sharp and blurred. So, in my work I seek to capture not so much the ironies and tragedies of environmental neglect but more so an affinity with the planet's beauty that questions the human propensity for neglect. This affinity surfaces as an ache mixed of grief, deep love, and gratitude. The ache though is not one of hopelessness. That is too easy a path to follow. I channel the feeling into an actionable hope that thrives in uncertainty. Beauty of the natural world holds power: power to arrest, to pause, to surprise, to make wonder, and to inspire change.
I spend much time walking (and crouching) in rural and wilderness areas, but it is within the cities and suburbs that I observe and am reminded how humans encroach on the natural world, not the other way around. So, I spend time wandering, wondering, and photographing these places, bearing witness to those more-than-human stories, as well, which overflow over, under, through the edges, that settle in and hold their ground. These more-than-humans, if we notice, often stare back at us, stare us down, greet us, ignore us.
I do not suggest in seeking beauty we turn away from the ugliness we have created. I suggest that there is a responsibility in that looking, and a responsibility to not neglect the beauty that is counterpart. As there is power in beauty, there is power in our slowing down, pausing, and attending. The camera holds a lens between myself and the world, yes, but I have to look and see first before I click.
