"Gallup Lakeside"........ from my Mid+West series 

"For the American photo-artist, Ellen Jantzen, this pursuit of meaning, and the desire to express that meaning to the viewer, has led her to a creative blend of photography with digital post-production. Her images are not so much literal (images as seen by the eyes) as they are evocative and poetic (images understood in the mind and in the imagination). These pictures grow from a synthesis of personal experience and external reality. Her various artistic series track the unfolding events for her life: her changing sense of place, her connection with Nature and the poignant disconnection of bereavement.

How are we connected to place? What is our relation to Nature? Where do we go when we die? These are some of the big questions in life and they have been asked ever since humankind began to understand past and present, cause and effect, and the difference between thinking and feeling. Yet Ellen Jantzen engages these ideas through a medium and vernacular of the modern day. She uses digital cameras and computer programs to create a visual language through which she can address these eternal questions. And her work has been widely circulated on the internet through social media and art-blogs. Here it has proved immensely popular; first for its aesthetic impact and then, when considered more subtly, for the complex but universal human condition on which the work is founded. Perhaps the most engaging aspect of this approach is that she does not claim to provide an answer to those timeless human questions, but rather to share her own processes of thinking and feeling about them. Her work exists within an empathic space, a space of shared emotional connection. The quest for deep meaning is a journey in which what matters is not the destination, but the time spent with fellow travelers."  Alasdair Foster, July 25, 2020 in "Talking Pictures"

© ellen jantzen - 2020