Deer Diary is a continuation of my searching for that place where fine art, documentary, and wildlife photography meet in the Montana landscape. For this series I chose to use a trail camera as my portal: the deer themselves become my collaborators by their diurnal and nocturnal movements through the landscape. Setting up the trail cam in places where their travels are already written into the earth via game trails and bent fence lines, I am able to document these creatures, my neighbors, as they traverse our landscape and tell their own story – a story told in art, mythology, religion, and literature, on almost all the world’s continents since Paleolithic times.

Biography:     

     Lauren Grabelle’s photography falls in the matrix where fine art and documentary meet, where she can tell truths about our relationships to other people, animals, nature, and ourselves.

      Her work has been included in galleries and museums across the US and Europe, in two Montana Triennials, and in 2018 at Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai, UAE. In 2021 her series The Last Man was recognized by LensCulture as a winner in the international photo competition HOME ’21, in 2022 as a Critical Mass TOP 50 winner, and in 2023 was shortlisted for PhEST in Monopoli, IT, as well as being part of UnBound12! at Candela Books and Gallery. Her series Deer Diary was awarded TOP 200 in Critical Mass in 2024, was a solo exhibition at the Missoula Art Museum and Blue Sky Gallery. In 2022 Ken Burns included her photo Tommy In His Car in his book Our America: A Photographic History, one of only 12 images included by a living photographer. Other projects have been featured in print and online in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, High Country News, Noema, Der Grief, Lenscratch, and others, as well as awarded inclusion in American Photography 10, 17, 36, 39, & 41.