Kelle Sauer
Salubria, digital photograph, 4″ x 3″
Untitled, digital photograph, 4″ x 6″
Freesia, digital photograph, 6″ x 4″
Le Rose del Mattino, digital photograph, 6″ x 4″
Anne’s Lace, digital photograph, 4″ x 6″
Ivy, digital photograph, 4″ x 3″
Morning, digital photograph, 6″ x 4″
Morning II, digital photograph, 6″ x 4″
Artist Statement
I am a poet-photographer, and I am His. I am drawn to the light, to its strength and its softness, to the front and back of it, to its gentle caress and to its wild glory. My work is to seek out light — in my subjects and in my everyday — and to share it. To catch it revealing the life we live and the way we live in it, to chase it falling into the shadows and layering into the dark, inviting wonder as it moves.
I photograph the flow of light everywhere, softness with structure, movement against form. There is no perspective that is not changed by light’s path, no texture or color that remains the same when the light splays itself over it. I have seen it weep, and I have seen it rejoice. I tell its story. I chronicle its temporary dwelling places and, sometimes, I wish a home for it but selfishly pull back my wish because I can’t let go of light’s gifts. I can’t stay in the dark.
My work is a love story, an acknowledgment of glory I still don’t understand. Each of my images is a poem without words, my way to say, I have an ache in my soul that doesn’t go away, an ache that won’t go away until the light finds its way home and takes me with it.
About the Artist
Kelle (“Kelly”) Sauer was born in upstate New York to a mother who had known poverty and a father with a movable job. Her earliest memories come to her in pictures—snippets of life re-composed into snapshots her parents never captured. She remembers lamplight, fire, and sunsets she couldn’t draw; rose-gold light spilled over crystal snow. She had no way to hold these memories outside of her imagination until her thirteenth Christmas, when she was given a little 35mm camera. Her first photo captured a frost that iced the fence around her family’s Illinois farmhouse.
As the oldest of eight children in a family that never settled down in one place, Kelle Sauer sorted her life by the familiar, making and remaking her identity in each new home. She didn’t know she was an artist; she was simply looking for beauty to hold onto wherever she was.
An entirely self-taught photographer, Kelle Sauer is grounded in her grandmother’s organically pragmatic aesthetic. Inspired by authenticity, high fashion, and classic art, her work is characterized by a textured, understated elegance that honors real life and the oft-unnoticed little things that make life and all its moments worth remembering.
Kelle Sauer’s wedding and lifestyle imagery has been featured both online and in print in Style Me Pretty, Elizabeth Anne Designs, Once Wed, Aisle Society, French Wedding Style, Utterly Engaged, Grey Likes Weddings, Weddings Unveiled, Southern Weddings, The Wedding Row, Hearth Magazine, Artful Blogging, Hochzeitsguide, Wedding Sparrow, Cottage Hill Magazine, Bella Grace Magazine, The High Calling, Tweetspeak Poetry, and many other publications.
Kelle Sauer Lifestyle Photography
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