Ellie Cooper

Ellie Cooper is a fine artist who obtained her B.F.A. in Photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Cooper has been an artist for as long as she can remember, focusing mainly on oil painting as her grandmother introduced it to her at a young age. It wasn't until taking her first Darkroom class in high school that Cooper discovered her passion for photography. Preferring labor-intensive technical processes, Cooper now specializes in making handmade traditional darkroom and alternative processes images. With these processes, Coopers photography focuses on history and how the past is represented in the present.  

Cooper's interest in History stems from her father, as he is a self-proclaimed “History Buff” and passed down his love for history and hunger for knowledge, down to his middle child. “Photo history and art history in general is so intriguing because it is a collection of regular people's reactions to the times they lived in. Untainted straight from, the often opinionated, artists mouth. And what I find truly amazing about photo history in particular is that you can map the creator's curiosities as time goes on and see how they changed the world monumentally” says Cooper. This manifests in Cooper's photography not only through her subject matter but through her use of alternative processes, Cooper likens the use of alternative processes to “Having a working knowledge of history”, and what better way for an artist to reference the past than with history itself.