“One day you will tell your story of how you’ve overcome what you are going through now and it will become part of someone else’s survival guide.”

For Bobbie Gravitt, photography is a meditative hobby that has brought a healing quality to her life. It’s a practice that over time has helped her grow and reflect, allowing her to focus and act more purposefully in her life. While she isn’t ready to tell her whole story to the world, these photographs have helped reveal pieces of herself, her reality, and her love of nature.

Bobbie’s love for horses has been a life-long passion. As a kid, she took riding lessons, went to horse camps, and to the dismay of her family would gallop around the house on her hands and knees wanting to be a horse. In general, she had always loved observing and exploring her surroundings whether it be animals and nature or how people interact with the world.

Eventually, she was able to capture these things when she was given a point and shoot Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle film camera. After taking it apart and removing the part that superimposed a Ninja Turtle on every photo, she took shots of scenery on their cross-country summer vacations and staged photoshoots at home with her Barbies and pets. As Bobbie grew older, her parents grew tired of paying to develop the film and after the camera finally broke, she moved on to other creative pursuits. Over the years she has tried out different mediums such as charcoal drawing, painting, sculpting, and ceramics.

However, life got in the way, as it always seems to do, and obstacles repeatedly threw Bobbie onto different paths in life. Having kids at 18 and 20 meant that she had greater responsibilities to attend to, and without the necessary resources, she couldn’t continue practicing the more involved arts such as ceramics. In 2014 she had to have emergency surgery on her neck which resulted in nerve damage that affected her left and dominant hand. Without the necessary control in that hand, she tried to train herself to draw and sculpt with the right one, but it didn’t hold the same enthusiasm as before.

This interest in the world around her is what led Bobbie to earn a degree in Psychology and more specifically Neuro-Psychological research. While she doesn’t feel ready to work with people in this field, she has utilized her education in the past by working with foster horses that come from neglected situations. Through desensitization training, she comforted and reassured horses while someone else would distract them with random noises to help get them accustomed to the human world. She also recently began an apprenticeship that helps train horses to accept riders. This kind of work has not only benefitted the horses but has helped Bobbie progress towards working more directly with people. Her end-goal is a position in research that would focus on the deficit in health care, specifically in mental health.

When Bobbie finally graduated from the University of Iowa in 2017, she received a camera much nicer than the turtle camera of her youth. Since then she has taught herself to use it in her free time by giving herself mini-assignments and traveling when she can. She has captured the architecture and street life of places such as Chicago and New Orleans, as well as the quieter moments of nature locally and in Alaska where her sister lives.

Bobbie shies away from the term photographer and sees herself as more of a hobbyist, but it’s clear from her work that she has a keen eye for light, color, and composition. The many photographs she brought to Press for this show reveals how far she has come with this craft and her intimate connection with nature. As Bobbie’s first public display of her art, she is not only opening herself up to the world but trying to improve it at the same time. She will be donating 50% of the proceeds to the Domestic Violence Intervention Program.

View her work anytime until January 26th and be sure to attend her reception on Thursday, January 9th, from 6-8 pm.