Betty Press

Betty Press has been photographing for more than 25 years. She grew up on a farm in Nebraska but left the Midwest to experience the world.  Her photographic career really started when she moved to Africa in 1987.  As a free lance photographer she quickly established connections with UNICEF, UNHCR, and other not profit organizations to photograph what was happening at that time.  She also contributed to most major magazines and newspapers.  In 1992 she had the honor of photographing Audrey Hepburn on her visit to Somalia as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

In 1995 she started a new phase which included teaching photography at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.  She started to show her African photographs which showed the more positive aspects of African society and culture. This work placed in Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 in 2005. She also continued to photograph in Florida, the African diaspora in Cuba, the Caribbean and Central America. 

Her photographs have been widely exhibited and collected around the world as well as being selected for many juried competitions. In 2011 she published her first award winning photobook I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb. She captured a stunning, life-affirming portrait of the African people and culture.  

Her project, Finding Mississippi, deals with living in Mississippi and trying to better understand the “place” where she now resides.  In 2012 she received the statewide award in photography from the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters and, in 2013 and again in 2018, a Visual Artist Fellowship Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission. In 2019 her work was selected for the Mississippi Invitational by the Mississippi Museum of Art,  Jackson, Mississippi and added to its permanent collection.

In the last few years magazines such as All About Photo, Don't Take Pictures, Doc Photo, Shots, Southern Glossary, Silvershotz , South x Southeast, Lenscratch, Rfotofolio, ACurator, Oxford American, Aint Bad Magazine, and John Wall’s Southern Photographer blog have featured her work. 

In 2019 she moved to Nairobi, Kenya to work on her African projects but had to return to the USA due to outbreak of the Covid pandemic. She continues to work on projects in Kenya and Mississippi.  Her latest project combines photos of shops in Kenya and Mississippi and is called Storefronts in Kenya and Mississippi: Combining My Two Worlds.

She is represented by Panos Pictures, London;  International Visions Gallery, Washington, DC; Fischer Galleries, Jackson, Mississippi; Treehouse Gallery, Oxford, Mississippi and One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya.