Broad Ripple, IN 46220 | Ph 317.403.5535 | emily@raincliffsphotography.com

Emily Persic Schwank has been known to characterize herself at unguarded moments as "stubborn, arrogant, smart, insecure, confident, curious, noisy, and a middle child." She has brown eyes, small wrists, and believes she walks too fast, which she uses as an ineffective excuse for her clumsiness.

Picking up a camera at the age of thirteen began a lifelong love of light, of imagery, of the constant and relentless struggle to steal a moment and translate it into something more.

Some of her greatest influences are Henri Carter-Bresson, Sally Mann, Robert Frank and Jock Sturges-Bresson and Frank with their beautiful and uncanny "street photography" and Mann and Sturges for their authentic and almost mystical images of children and families. A poet from birth, Emily finds through writing and photography a way to connect with the world as it appears to her. This un-solitary life is formed by tragedy and beauty, love and anger, in equal doses. In this, Emily finds purpose: whether it is found in busy foreign streets, wild holy places, or her own back yard, she stumbles across images and finds them irresistible. Travel and new experience drive her. She strives everyday to see, really see;
it seems so many images of grace and tragedy slip by without acknowledgment because the world is unwilling to open it's eyes-not only to the obvious, but to the possible. Traveling helps renew that vision-while in a new place, all is strange and astounding and beautiful to her. When she returns home things become clearer: the torn curtain, the dingy wall, the beautiful, overgrown garden, the people in the city walking down the street who turn toward or away from each other in hope and agony.

Ireland holds a special love for Emily; she returns there again and again drawn by both familial ties and simple love of the duality of the two countries that make up the one island. The untamed, spiritual countryside calls to her as much as the cities do, but especially the West with it's oceans and cliffs and fields and then, across miles and borders, the city of Belfast, capture her heart and mind. Both seem to hold a blend of beauty and heartlessness, comedy and tragedy and above all, endurance-past one person's life, past political parties and warfare, famines and feasts, past ice cream cones, rose-gardens, sea-worms, nuns, sheep, chippies, pubs, holy wells, parades, picnics, bombs, drunks, photographers-they, the rocks and the waves, the city streets lit by lamplight, the graceful Victorian townhouses, they that hold that undefinable essence that is Ireland-endure. It is that which draws her, that which she hopes to capture- not only in Ireland, but in all places she goes, abroad or home.

Despite situations and visions of a nation, a world, that seem increasingly dark, Emily retains an absurd and steadfast sense of optimism.