Alison has been a photographer since she was young. Recognizing her interest, her father took her to New York City to buy her first serious camera, a Leica. She never studied photography – “I just responded to my environment with the camera. Because I was self-taught and learned by making mistakes, my road was longer. But I think my work is more unique. There was no baggage, no ‘shoulds,’ no emulating.”

Having been a “summer kid” on the island, visiting her grandparents in Edgartown every summer, she returned after graduating from Smith College in 1975. As she likes to say, she ”came here just for the summer, and never left.“

The island of Martha’s Vineyard is Alison’s muse. Often asked how she stays inspired, living on an island that’s under 100 square miles in size, she responds: “Living and working on such a small island forces me to go deeper. If I lived on the mainland, whenever I needed more inspiration, I would get in the car and go to a new location. There are no boundaries. But here, surrounded by water, my territory is defined. This translates to almost a physical need to keep evolving, to grow as an artist and see ever deeper and wider. If I didn’t evolve as an artist, I’d get bored, and the creative spark would disappear. On the island, it‘s not about finding a new environment, as fun and adventurous as that can be. It‘s about finding something within myself.”

According to Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer Stan Grossfeld, “Alison is to the Vineyard what Georgia O’Keefe is to the American Southwest.” Vineyard Gazette writer Mollie Doyle puts it this way: ”For the past 40 years, Alison Shaw’s photographs have been shaping the way we see the Island, the emotional quiet of our water ways, the rich palette of our farms and fields, and the depth not just of our piers, but of our community itself.”

Having worked as a full-time artist since 1975, Alison has gone through many stages of evolution. At the beginning, she shot exclusively in black & white. These were the “Gazette years”…