Jolene Monheim

Photography

I was born in Billings, Montana in 1952 and raised in Laurel, and Missoula, Montana. I lived in various places through out the western U.S., Alaska, and Mexico, before returning to Missoula in 1976, to study at the University of Montana. I studied fine arts for two years, before changing my major to physical therapy. After receiving my degree, I moved to Great Falls, Montana to raise my two boys and work. I had a private PT practice for 19 years and sold my practice in 2003 to pursue my first love of the visual arts. I purchased my first digital camera in 2000, and used it primarily to take travel photographs and photograph landscapes and still life’s for painting reference material. I began to photograph dancers underwater in 2005, and have been utterly captured by that environment ever since.

My work is about beauty, reflections, harmony, the magic of collaboration, and about relationships. Especially the relationship we have with our bodies within our environment. The shapes that bodies take in the watery environment fascinate me. I go underwater with my models and have no special equipment, other than an Aquatec housing, and my Canon cameras. Pools seem to appear whenever they're needed as do the models. Since dancers have special abilities to express themselves with their bodies, I primarily use them as my subjects, and I am called to do their art justice with my own.

I have been heavily influenced by Eastern mysticism. At the age of 17, I ran away from home to live in a yoga ashram - The Integral Yoga Institute - or IYI, in Berkeley California. Sri Swami Satchidananda, the first wise and holy man I had ever been in the same room with, inoculated in me a process of awareness that continues to grow within me. During my subsequent and ongoing journeys through the different realms of spirituality, marriage, motherhood, business and art, I continue to be drawn to a more holistic and integrated world view.