I was born Ellen Babinec and grew up in Little Falls, New York, a small town on the Mohawk River. I lived in that town until I was eighteen and by then was sufficiently restless to be on the move for the next fourteen years. By the time I ended up at my current home in Schenectady, New York, I had attended seven colleges, earned three degrees, and lived in thirty places, including Upstate New York, rural Virginia, Boston, New York, and Oxford, England. (My husband, who lived in twenty-six of them with me, kept a list of them all). I arrived in Schenectady with two children and one soon to come. Shortly after the third one arrived, in 1987, I began writing for children. My work was first published in magazines and my first book proposal, Brothers And Sisters, was accepted in 1992.
I had gotten involved in photography in the late seventies. I got started when my husband bought a camera and insisted, after all we'd paid for it, that I learn how to use it, too. I felt intimidated by the technicalities but learned and became absolutely hooked. (I now own several cameras, all of which intimidate him.) I was always interested in writing and wrote endless pages of stories, poems, plays, letters, and journals from grade school on. When I was in college, I decided writing would be pretty impractical work and switched from English to teaching. I quit teaching after five years when I realized how susceptible I was to photography disease and then went to graduate school for educational media and technology, which is where I got my only formal training in photography.
My work is basically photo-documentary in style, and I am allergic to the posed look of studio photography as well as the self-conscious look of gallery photography. When I set up my equipment on a site, I strive to become invisible so I can catch faces coming alive with natural expressions in a natural environment. I also listen to what goes on while I'm photographing so I can blend natural-sounding language with the images in my books. Many pieces of my past - traveling, teaching, writing, editing, photographing, and parenting - converge in this process of melding words and images. And, in the process, I get to be around the most lively, genuine, and emotional people I know: kids. Teaching was good but this is better - I always get to be the hero, looking for each child's special essence, never the bad guy who has to dish out grades. Every child has an essential beauty and it's my mission to seek it out and mirror it back in my work. So with ten-plus books out, more on the way, and still having fun, I guess I'll stay at this totally impractical but fulfilling work of creating children's picture books.