Jane Liechty is a fine art photographer who lives in State College, Pennsylvania. She is from Sheffield, England. In her early years, she earned a music degree from The University of Birmingham and a teaching certificate from The University of Cambridge. While in Cambridge, she met and married John; they moved to the United States, where she spent a whole lot of time and energy raising a family. Now that the children are grown, she has turned to photography.
Jane studies photography at Pennsylvania State University and will graduate with a Bachelor of Design in Professional Photography in December 2024. In 2021, she received the Leslie P. Greenhill scholarship – an award recognizing students with a serious involvement in and commitment to photography.
During 2022-23, Jane lived in Cambridge, England, where she completed two large-scale photography projects. The first project tells of her personal experience in Cambridge, and the second, London-opoly, is a visit to the properties on London’s Monopoly gameboard. Both projects will be published as books. Her current project is a wander about quintessential small-town Pennsylvania, in search of the Beautiful and the True.
Jane has exhibited work at the Zoller and Keller galleries at Penn State University and Schlow Library in State College as part of the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts Juried Exhibition. Her first solo show will be at the Bellefonte Art Museum in August 2024.
Artist Statement
I think in terms of photographs. I look for shape and shadow, color and connection, but mostly, I look at how people move through the world. For me, people make a place; understanding this human connection is vital. I photograph what is between people and among them and the things that they create. Often, I stop and talk with the people I photograph.
Above all, I seek composition—an ideal alignment of Beauty and Truth. Beauty reveals structure; without organization, life is chaos. Beauty pushes aside the negative and neutral. Truth gives meaning to life; more than fact, it’s the reason and the real. In my reach for these ideals, I strive to overcome the disconnect that, of necessity, exists in all of art. Often, I am still. I create; I don’t appropriate. Creation is intuitive; I only know it when it happens.
Photographs are a simplification of the world. I like their neat boundaries and how they abstract and package life. A photograph is a model; reality exists outside its frame and flatness. Models approximate the world. The more they align with Beauty and Truth, the better they explain life. This is the purpose of my work and what I hope, in the end, to understand.
