Bio

Photographer and graphic designer Shaddock Stipe grew up on the front edge of a large Southern farm which has been in his family for over 100 years in a small farmhouse with a darkroom at its center. A fourth generation Dixie, Georgia, farmer, Shaddock took the freedom from urban want created by rural living and his communal approach to nature with him as he wandered out into and explored both world and wilderness. His unconventional lifestyle gives him the ability to see the world as an adventure, deepening his need to be a seeker, allowing him to know possibility and shape in himself and then share with us the bravery of freedom. Shaddock worked at the Telluride Film Festival and the Mountain Film Festival, and he reached his own exhilaration through the images he shaped into photographs. From a family of photographers and writers, he follows the love of his father, John Stipe, a WWII photographer whose more than 3500 photographs from the non-digital age are housed in the American History Museum at the Smithsonian. Shaddock shot his first photographs with a Brownie. 

Stipe’s mother, Nancy Lowrey Stipe, a farmer, writer and community volunteer and philanthropist, encouraged Shaddock, her youngest child, who was only a year old when his father died, to pursue whatever made him happy with a trust in the world and himself. His mother taught him both to pursue the whimsy of freedom and to ground himself in the natural world, and she put the first camera in his hand as a way of introducing him to the father she refused to allow that he had lost. At the American History Museum, Shaddock scanned each of his father’s more than 3500 photographs into digital files; and he began to look through the lens of his father’s perspective, seeing what his father saw, knowing his father’s choices, coming to know his father deeply. Shaddock began a dialogue then, which has continued, with his father, a small town preacher’s son, a farmer and a writer, a World War II photographer, and a photojournalist for United Pictures International (UPI), The St. Louis Post Dispatch and The Florida Times Union, among other media outlets. 

Shaddock’s pursuit of learning to know and shape images have been his education, teaching him art and craft, helping him to choose what he shares as he selects his framing, his angles, his lenses, making it possible for Shaddock to paint with light, helping him know what he sees and what he should show us. In the midst of work and the getting and spending that most of us do each day, the voice and perspective of someone who has truly eschewed material pursuits for the freedom to choose what he does, where he goes, what he sees and what he photographs each day is essential.

Writer Forrest Henry Book speaks to this, saying, “I felt at a certain point - in a photograph of a cabin, set among woodlands - Somewhere in that mélange of images - I felt that I saw Shaddock’s heart.  It’s fantastic that his art follows in his father’s footsteps. The age we live in confronts the strength of personage in those who are practitioners of the craft of creating beautiful.  Thank goodness there are the Stipes in this world.”

Dr. Shirley M. Stipe-Zendle,
Winston-Salem, NC