Natural Abstracts' Anne Cherry

Anne Cherry is a retired educator and school librarian. She grew up on an orchard in Perry County, Pennsylvania, where she got her first camera when she was 6 years old and started taking pictures of her family and activities on the orchard. She also took pictures of friends at school and was president of the shutterbug club in addition to many other activities in high school.

In college, Anne continued her love of photography and enjoyed taking photographs of her friends and college activities. She was almost never to be seen without her camera. She graduated from Shippensburg University with a Bachelors degree in Elementary Education. Anne started her career as an elementary teacher in Newport, Pennsylvania. In 1970 she moved to Shippensburg, Pennsylvania where she continued teaching and also earned a Masters degree in Communication. In 1977 she took a job with the Department of Defense Overseas Dependents Schools and moved to Germany with her son, Kurt. While in Germany, Anne took every opportunity to travel throughout Europe taking photographs. She always carried three cameras – one for slides, one for black and white, and one to take snapshots for her photo albums. It was here she also had access to a community darkroom where she spent many hours processing and printing black and white photographs, many of which were displayed in the school where she was teaching. In 1981, Anne returned to Pennsylvania to pursue a degree in Library Science. She completed her career in education as a high school librarian in Greencastle PA where she also served several years as advisor for the yearbook. Because professional photographers were not always at the school, Anne would often scout the school taking action photos of students and teachers involved in day to day activities for the yearbook. She also set up a darkroom in her basement and spent many nights processing film and developing her own work. Anne retired in 2000 and began to focus on her photography. She also took a part-time job at a garden center and started taking photographs of plants and flowers. In 2005, her husband gave her a digital camera for her birthday. She resisted the change to digital because she didn’t feel it was really photography without film and chemicals, but once she got the images from the digital camera on the computer screen she says, “It opened up a whole new dimension to my photography.” She uses Photoshop to capture and enhance the abstract images she finds in her photographs of plants and flowers.

Anne currently lives in East Berlin, Pennsylvania. In addition to her photography, she enjoys working at the garden center, traveling, and fishing with her husband, Bill.