Betty Press
Betty Press is a fine art and documentary photographer whose career spans more than 30 years. Her photographic career started when she moved to Africa in 1987 where she established connections with UNICEF, UNHCR, and other non-profit organizations. With Press’ most recent photo project, Finding Mississippi, she intentionally photographs her adoptive home state using old and/or inexpensive analog cameras to achieve imperfections on the film negative, which, she says, serve as metaphors for “how landscape, race, and religion have played a part in the complicated history of Mississippi and still affect lives today.”
Her photographs have been widely exhibited and collected around the world. In 2011 she published an award-winning photobook “I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb”. Since then, Press’ photographs have been featured in many magazines including Shots, Southern Glossary, Lenscratch, RfotoFolio, Oxford American, About Photo, Kenya Arts Diary and more.
Press has been honored with many awards, including two visual Artist Fellowship Grants from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a statewide award in photography, from the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters and twice in the top 50 of Critical Mass Photo Lucida. In 2025 she was one of 12 artists selected for the Mississippi Invitational, Mississippi Museum of Art. Her work is held in several public collections including Beinecke Library at Yale University, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, The Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, The University of Texas, Austin, and Mississippi Museum of Art.