Rinne Allen is a photographer living in Athens, Georgia.
Working in both color and black&white, she photographs daily
as a way to remember the things she sees and experiences.

Whether in images from her backyard garden or from as far away as India, she finds that beauty is in a detail, or in the movement or sway of something, and that it can be found all around us if we make the effort to look.

Born in Athens in 1973, Rinne studied photography and art at a small school on top of a mountain in Tennessee affectionately called Sewanee. She has traveled all over, lived for a time in Paris, and now enjoys living in and getting to know the place where she grew up. A small college town known for its thriving art & music scene, Athens provides a beautiful place to live and work, as well as a near year-round gardening calendar due to its mild clime.

Rinne also sews, and gets a lot of her inspiration {when she is indoors} from her pile of fabrics, trimmings, patterns, and handwork. Most of it is old and found, and all of shows the hand of the maker. This trace of a hand's signature is something she attempts to imprint on each photograph.

Rinne and her husband, Lee, maintain the garden of a former architect & landscape designer, the late Dr. John Linley, and have spent the last 12 years building on the legacy he left behind. Their most recent project is Rinne's new studio that opens onto the garden. And they have been eating early salad greens from the veggie plot and now have four plymouth rock chickens to tend to.

Rinne feels very lucky to work with other artists too. She has photographed for r.wood studio for the last eleven years, and has worked with hable construction for the last four, as well as other independent, made-in-the-usa artisans...their beautiful, handmade work inspires her own, and together they create picture stories that are more closely related to installations, than product shots. She also curates the ideas for creative living section at rwoodstudio.com where she and rebecca wood share their inspirations from around the south each season. And she and her sister, lucy, write & photograph for the wonderful british textile publication, selvedge.

the time i have spent in my garden, in my hometown, in a small town, has helped me see that moments of experience and perception, when felt, help to provide a balance to the world's hectic-ness. almost meditative, my way of photographing is a search for the essence of something, in it's simplest form. that form then becomes part of my memory, something to reference on my next outing. it helps me stay here, and this feeling, while fleeting, is something i look forward to.
enjoy looking.


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