“It’s very therapeutic for me,” said Ms. Gellhorn, about her art. “I don’t care so much about it being good.”
We all know her as an enthusiastic English teacher and the faculty advisor of The Campus Lantern, but when school is over, Ms. Gellhorn likes to release her stress with photography, painting, weaving, knitting, and gardening.
Over the years, her art has taken multiple forms as she has moved worldwide. Since college, she’s lived in Krakow, Seattle, New York and Philadelphia. “When I lived in Krakow, I took drawing classes,” said Ms. Gellhorn.
Ms. Gellhorn’s next “phase,” as she called it, after Krakow, was in Seattle. When she was there, she was “surrounded by natural beauty,” she reminisced. “[Seattle] was my photography phase,” Ms. Gellhorn noted. “My photography phase came alongside my mother’s death, and so I found a lot of solace in going out into the world and finding things that were beautiful to me. Framing and capturing them just really put me at peace.”
During her time in Seattle, she traveled constantly with her husband. “My husband and I did road trips all the time, around Washington, Oregon … we went to Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and obviously [in those places] there’s just endless things to photograph,” said Ms. Gellhorn.
Her love for photography goes beyond the photos, themselves. Ms. Gellhorn loves taking the photos and prefers to do so in the least tech-heavy way she can. “[Ms. Gellhorn] wants her photography to feel as analog as possible,” commented her husband, Dr. Gellhorn. That’s why Ms. Gellhorn uses a medium format, film camera that “weighs about 4 pounds and is the size of a brick,” he explained.
Ms. Gellhorn eventually moved from Seattle, but her photography didn’t end there. “I love taking photos of my children and their cousins at our family farm in the Catskills in New York.” She added, “It feels like I’m just capturing these, like, fleeting moments of their childhood that I wish I could hold on to forever.”
When Ms. Gellhorn landed in Philadelphia in 2009, she became interested in weaving. “I took weaving classes, and learned how to weave on a big loom at the Philadelphia Weavers Guild, which is in Manayunk.”
As if photography and weaving weren’t enough, Ms. Gellhorn also gardens, mostly in the Catskills. Dr. Gellhorn said, “She developed a master plan for a large area on our family farm, and threw herself into every step of the process,” which included “removing tons (literally tons!) of boulders, tilling the earth, and filling the space with her version of an English cottage garden.”
Now, Mrs. Friedland, one of Ms. Gellhorn’s close friends, is a big fan, and supporter of her art. “Sometimes she’ll invite friends over, including me, to meet with her,” said Mrs. Friedland. “I’ve water colored with her, I’ve done fiber art with her, and I’ve also come and seen work that she’s created after the fact.”
“She’s quite extraordinary,” said Mrs. Friedland, “she’s at the intersection of beauty and purpose”
