Biography

Photographer Joyce Seymore has explored the world through her camera lens for over 50 years.

Her passion for photography began at the University of Florida, where she majored in art history and studied with master photographer Jerry Uelsmann, who inspired her love of darkroom printing. During her career spanning two decades in the photography departments of several Time Inc. magazines, including Time, People, and Money, she worked with some of the greatest journalistic photographers in the world. As an occasional reporter, she contributed articles on celebrated photographers and artists, including Deborah Turbeville, Jennifer Bartlett, and Joan Mitchell.

After leaving Time Inc. in 1986, Seymore pursued her own photographic projects, including a decades-long series on ferns, whose subtle variations continue to intrigue her. A member of the New York Fern Society since 1998, she grows the many varieties that she uses in her work.

Seymore has continued her botanical photography while also exploring urban landscapes. In 2011, she was invited as a Visiting Artist to the American Academy in Rome, where she spent seven weeks documenting the graffiti and tattered posters on the city’s ancient walls. Forty of these photos were included in her open studio at the Academy and later at the National Arts Club in New York. More recently, she has traveled many times to India to explore the vibrant surfaces of its cities.

She lives in Connecticut with her husband, Jim Seymore, a retired magazine editor.

Artist Statement

I am drawn to what often goes unnoticed, the ephemeral, the imperfect. I see beauty in the unconventional — the arrangement of fish at a market in Kochi, the pattern of staples on a message board in North Carolina, bits of torn posters on a wall in Rome or Varanasi, and the astonishing variety of tiny fern crosiers as they unfurl in my Connecticut garden. I prefer to focus in tightly with my lens to isolate my subjects from their context until they are abstracted. My work is about discovery and impermanence. Whether in the darkroom or with my camera, I encourage the unexpected. These chance operations and encounters have yielded mysterious, often ambiguous images. Investigation and close observation have propelled me to places I’d never imagined.