LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

The Female Gaze: Ann Mitchell—The Emotional Connection of Place by Diana Nicholette JeonJuly 12, 2026

Ann Mitchell is a Southern California-based artist, curator and educator who uses photography to explore space and place, actively engaged in creating worlds of poetic experience. Mitchell received a BFA in Photography from ArtCenter College of Design and spent more than a decade as an award-winning advertising and editorial photographer before earning an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Along the way she developed a parallel practice as a curator, organizing photography exhibitions and fostering creative communities. She later joined the Art Department at Long Beach City College, where she taught for more than twenty years and served as Chair and Digital Media Program Coordinator.

Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally and has been featured in numerous publications. Across projects including The Chance Chronicles, Meditative Spaces, and Between Dusk and Dawn, Mitchell continues to investigate how memory, landscape, and the handmade photographic print can transform the familiar into something quietly unexpected.

Weathered white walls and climbing vines frame a small opening onto trees and sky, © Ann Mitchell.

Ann Mitchell creates constructed photographic landscapes that hover between memory, cinema, dream, and place. Working from her own imagery, writing prompts, digital montage, and historic hand-applied processes, she transforms observed landscapes into emotionally charged spaces where solitude, loss, home, and imagination become visible.

I can’t remember exactly when or where I first saw Ann Mitchell’s work, but I remember that I fell in love with it instantly. They were photo-composites that looked so real I could imagine myself standing in the spaces she created. The work was seamless. And stunning.

In Mitchell’s hands, atmosphere carries meaning. There is a sense that something is “off,” but you can’t quite put your finger on what or why. These spaces and places are almost palpable in their expressions of waiting, departure, return, and uncertainty. They feel charged by longing, even when there are no figures in the scene, as if they are holding a memory just before it disappears.

Mitchell’s practice also reveals a deep commitment to both process and materials. The work often begins with recognizable sites, but via her processes, place becomes unstable, cinematic, and emotionally inhabited. The presence of her hand alongside digital construction asks us to look not only at what is pictured, but at how memory, touch, and time accumulate on the surface.

The vulnerability in Mitchell’s work is quiet—but it is not passive. Instead, it creates a mood that feels both intimate and unsettled. The images ask what it means to search for home, for belonging, for the shape of an experience that cannot be fully named.

An open mixed-media book spread with a pale face, green text, and a small inserted photograph, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: Tell us about your childhood.

AM: I guess you could call my early years Bohemian. My mother was returning to school to get her degree in painting and she and I lived in UCLA student housing. My parents had a coffee house during that time (the 1960s) on the Sunset Strip called The Fifth Estate. My mother ran life drawing classes in the same building, and in the basement, there were underground newspapers and screenings of experimental films. I was raised with a lot of freedom and an understanding that it was our responsibility to make this a better place.

A deep blue cyanotype book spread with a silhouetted figure and a pinned landscape photograph, © Ann Mitchell.

This early life had a big impression on me. I occasionally went to class with my Mom, hung out while she painted, and we spent a lot of time in the stacks of the UCLA library. Back then you could let your kids wander, and I often found myself in the architectural photography section. I had no idea at the time that those books were shaping me, but years later I realized that my own work still revolves around architecture, atmosphere, and the emotional presence of places.

A horizontal triptych showing a sepia-toned bridge and river landscape, © Ann Mitchell.

A circular sepia-toned image of a palm tree, small white building, and shoreline with encaustic media, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: How did you start in photography? Can you speak a bit about that path?

AM: My photography career started by accident. My parents had a movie theater when I was a teenager and I had learned how to be a projectionist. In my early 20s I moved to Chicago; that skill allowed me to get a job in the photo lab of Billings Hospital, the medical school at University of Chicago. I was showing films and slides during lectures. Eventually, I got trained to work in other areas of the lab where we did everything: photographing professors, architectural photography, documenting surgery and the morgue, running the color line, and printing in the darkroom.. It was the first job that I’d ever had that was never boring! That was the impetus for my desire to go to Art Center College of Design and get my BFA in Photography.

My early commercial career was primarily large format studio work, product and food photography. I enjoyed the experience, but I was always more interested in the imagery I did for myself—and that inspired me to go back for and get my MFA from Claremont Graduate University.

A warmly lit bedroom with a patterned bedspread and a small constructed landscape inside a suitcase placed on the bed, © Ann Mitchell.

A small pale building stands among trees beside a path in warm late-day light, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: Your process moves between the computer and very tactile, historic photographic processes. What does the handmade print give back to work that begins in digital montage? Why are platinum/palladium and gum over platinum the right materials for some of your work? Is it about tone, unpredictability, history, touch, or all of it?

AM: I love the idea that I am traversing such a broad scope of photography – using all its tools to tell my stories. With the digital environment, I have so much control, probably too much for a control freak like me, so then I love the unpredictability of the handmade print. Even if you do everything the same, there will still be variations within each one in terms of how you brushed the chemistry out and how it processed that day. I like contrast in my work and in my life, so the contrast between control and happenstance, between precision and chance, is very interesting to me. I want to make room for the fates to come in and participate in my art-making experience.

There’s such a rich depth of tone in platinum/palladium work – I love that and its warmth. I started doing the gum over platinum with the Between Dusk and Dawn series because there were images where it really felt like it needed some cool tones in the mix and I wasn’t 100% sure that cyanotype was doing it for me. What I really love about gum-over is that you can (sort of) control how far the cool tone moves into the warm. That mix of cool shadows and warm highlights is just magic when it works!

I will say that I had a goal of slowing down my art-making, and that was something that handmade prints gave me. But after doing gum over platinum, a little voice inside my head said “maybe it’s slow enough.“

A sunlit road curves beneath a concrete overpass edged by trees and flowers, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: You describe the images as “the first frame of a movie.” What kind of narrative do you want to open without closing it down?

AM: I like the idea that these images start a narrative within the viewer – that the movie happens within their own imaginations. That’s what these images are to me – I look at them and they seem to move. This was why I tried doing some animations with Chance Chronicles where I played with movement, time, and sound to show a bit of the worlds I imagine these images inhabiting.

A pale architectural detail of a rounded observatory-like building against blue sky, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: I loved the animations you did with Chance Chronicles! I related to their slow but steady movements. Moving forward but including that work, across several projects, you return to Southern California, but not the glossy Hollywood version. What are you trying to make visible?

AM: I grew up here and there’s a certain “old California” quality that I love from when this area felt like a collection of sleepy little towns. I love sitting in a strip mall parking lot and seeing signs that have multiple languages laid over each other. That mix of cultures is probably my favorite part of living here. In visual terms, there was a terrific architectural time period, around the 1920s-30s, when many of the classic buildings and bridges were built, and I’m fascinated by them and the sense of style and presence they bring to an image.

A misty black-and-white landscape with overhanging branches and a pale figure near water, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: In Chance Chronicles, you describe objects as characters. Does that carry into Between Dusk and Dawn? Who or what “acts” in these landscapes?

AM: Yes, it does carry into Between Dusk and Dawn, I think it’s present in all of my work. For the most part I don’t use people in my imagery because it becomes very specifically about that person. I will use a figure, but it’s often obscured or facing away from us. Trees are one of my favorite “characters” to work with – I love how they have such a timeless presence within an image.

DNJ: You’ve said that Between Dusk and Dawn grew out of insomnia. How did sleeplessness change your sense of time, space, and image-making?

AM: It’s important to me that my artwork is closely linked to what’s happening in my life and who I am at the core. With insomnia, that time between dusk and dawn becomes really charged and almost feeds on itself. Time becomes elastic. The hours can feel much longer than they really are, and the familiar starts to feel unfamiliar. It’s almost like entering another world, and that emotional atmosphere naturally found its way into the work.

A shadowed path winds through dense trees in a dark, atmospheric landscape, © Ann Mitchell.

Ann Mitchell, The Path, from the series Between Dusk and Dawn

DNJ: You describe night as its own land. What becomes possible in that psychological/nighttime space that is harder to access in daylight?

AM: I have always loved the night and I’m not sure if part of that comes from experiences as a child? At one point when I was growing up, my father had an independent newspaper, and he would service the newspaper boxes at night. Every once in a while, he’d let me come with him, and the city just felt so exciting—it was so mysterious to be out at night when everybody else was indoors at home. Visually, I love what can happen at night in terms of light and shadow. Very few of my images happen in stark daylight. I love a glow on the horizon and elements that speak to the human presence such as a glowing doorway or a partially lit window. It feels like nighttime is ripe for a journey, it’s when the story happens.

A small house sits in a dark blue landscape beneath a stormy sky, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: Recently you wrote about designing your own residency, and the feature was quite interesting to me. I did something similar after my mother died when I was in Massachusetts to clean out her home. I went to Martha’s Vineyard, and I was alone. I decided, “Use this time to make as much work as you can. Go everywhere and photograph/video everything. Bring it all back to Hawai’i and work with it later on.” But you had a much better structure and plan for what you did than I had. What made you realize you wanted a residency structure, even if you did not need—or could not use—a traditional residency?

AM: This past year, I’ve had all kinds of issues related to my inkjet printers. There was a point where I realized I’d spent too much time thinking about printers, nozzles, profiles and paper feeds instead of thinking about photography. Plus, while I really enjoy community-building activities like curation and organizing – it can end up being a lot of energy going outwards. I just felt overwhelmed and scattered, and I wanted a strong reset – to just say “no” to outside activities and get back to being an artist. In the past I’d had several sabbaticals and had that example of sitting down and writing up what my goals were and how I was going to go about achieving them.

Two open doorways frame a bare tree against a textured wall of sky and water. © Ann Mitchell.

A lone figure stands beneath arched architecture facing a misty waterfront, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: In the same feature, you wrote about process and how it helped you understand what would actually constitute “finished.” How do you know when a constructed image, or a body of work, has reached that point?

AM: In terms of when a specific image is done, that really depends on the image. Some images come to me whole cloth, and my work is just realizing that vision. Because it already exists, fully formed, in my mind, it’s pretty easy to tell when it’s done. Other images evolve over time. I’m usually starting with an element that inspires me and then I start working with it and seeing where it’s leading. What’s great about photography is you can save multiple versions out and keep going. With many of my images, I might have 5-10 variations or more, at which point my studios walls become part of the editing process. I’ll pin several versions up and live with them for a week or two. It’s surprising how one I was initially excited about quietly drops away and I find myself drawn to another.

In terms of a body of work, there’s usually either an idea or approach that’s driving the work. At first the images really flow and then that energy starts to slow down. I’m usually trying for an initial 30-40 images and then I do a hard edit down to 12-20 for a “final portfolio.” It can be hard to give up images I like, but I save them and maybe they fit with a different grouping later – or they become a “one-off.” Usually by that point, I’ve started daydreaming about a few new projects…so it’s time to move on.

An open artist book with a patterned pink page and a typed letter or statement page, © Ann Mitchell.

Loose artist-book pages with photographs and text arranged on a white surface, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: You have said that the catalog becomes one of the most useful outcomes. What does seeing the work together tell you that individual images could not?

AM: This really speaks to the issue of creating a body of work – at that point I had boxes of prints stacked around the studio and had even started working on a new project. It was all jumbled up and the catalog allowed me to clarify what I had, what media I was using, and what could be included in a finished body of work I could start showing people. I realized I had made a lot more work than I thought, and having the catalog allowed me to start entering shows and having a dialogue about the work.

A faded street scene with an orange car parked near a motel or storefront, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: You wrote about wanting to move beyond a limited-edition portfolio approach. What changes when an image becomes variable or unique rather than being editioned?

AM: For the most part, up until now, I’ve worked in the Limited Edition method – where you are making “x” number of relatively identical prints of a specific image. When I started doing pastel over pigments, there were going to be fairly big variations in how the pastels laid over the print. So my Impressions of the California Southland work is done as a Variable Edition.

For the Dusk/Dawn project, I’m interested in the idea of using the Unique Edition approach, which I see as giving me the ability to take an original image and explore where it can go. So that might mean I break it into a grid and print in multiple sections, or I layer it in fabrics, or I do it in a traditional platinum. I love the idea that the original image is just the beginning of the conversation. Also, this approach allows me to really enjoy all of the art-making process.

A quiet street view of a green building façade with a dark door and tiled wall, © Ann Mitchell.

You have spent decades teaching, mentoring, curating, and building photo communities. How has that shaped the way you understand your own work?

AM: I’m not sure that these are separate pursuits. Socially, those activities and experiences come from my childhood training that it’s our responsibility to make life better. Artistically, it all comes from the same source – it’s the desire for resonance that guides me in my own work, only I am helping others find and clarify it in theirs.

A building façade with red lanterns hanging above a blue arched doorway, © Ann Mitchell.

@ Ann Mitchell, Chung King Road, Chinatown, from the series Impressions of the California Southland

DNJ: What are you working on now? What is next on the horizon?

AM: Currently, I’m finishing up Between Dusk and Dawn, looking at how my ideas about creating unique editions might work for the project as a whole. Up next, I’ve written a short Fable that I’ve just started illustrating (the image Cove is from it) – and I’d like to integrate my ceramics and bookmaking into the project as well.

In general, my interests with photography are really expanding to include other media and approaches. I’d love to find a small collective with a public space where I could explore how photography can be expanded.

A red building with palm trees, umbrellas, and patio seating in front, © Ann Mitchell.

DNJ: Thank you ever so much, Ann, for the time and thought you have given me in this interview. I always find it so fascinating to get a peek into the inner workings of the minds and practices of my peers. This has been incredible. Readers, if you would like to see more of Ann’s work, it can be found on her website and her Instagram feed. Thank you so much for reading.