Kelle ("Kell-ee") 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 real life recomposed into snapshots never captured. She remembers lamplight, fire and sunsets she couldn’t draw, rose-gold light spilled over crystal snow. She couldn't hold these memories outside of her imagination until her thirteenth Christmas, when she was given a little blue 35mm camera. Her first photo captured a frost that iced the fence around her family’s Illinois farmhouse. 

Shaped by her nomadic childhood, Kelle has sorted her life by the familiar, imagining and reimagining her identity in each new home. She learned to find the old in the new and make memories where she had none, traveling the whole world in her own backyard, creating space for her old soul to breathe. 

As an entirely self-taught artist, she grounds her dramatic vision in her grandmother’s organic european aesthetic, drawing inspiration with authenticity from high fashion and 18th Century art. Her current work is characterized by a textured, understated elegance that honors real life, real emotion, and the oft-unnoticed little things
that make life worth remembering. 

I am drawn to the light, to its strength and its softness, to the front of it and the back of it, to its gentle caress and to its wild glory. My work is to seek it out - 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 it everywhere, softness within structure, movement against form. 

There is no perspective that is not changed by its path, no texture or color that remains the same when the light splays itself out over it. I have seen it weep, and I have seen it rejoice. I tell its story.