Mary Lou works as a freelance photographer with a passion for environmental portraiture. Her work has appeared in publications such as Time, Ladies Home Journal, Newsweek, New Orleans Magazine, Success Magazine and Inc. Magazine. She loves long term projects dealing with our humanity and is presently immersed in two documentaries: Spiritual YAYA and Structure Out of Chaos. Both projects are explorations of community and how people operate in groups.
For the past 24 years she has been watching homeless people who build shantytowns in the United States. When she started the project in 1993 encampments were a safe place for homeless people to live without fear of being arrested for their circumstances. Currently there is a battle going on between those who want the problem to go away and people who have nowhere to go. Local laws get passed trying to force the homeless to become invisible. Her work is about encouraging meaning discourse on the topic of chronic homelessness in one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Through portraiture she believes she can return some dignity to the people being photographed.
In another series she is exploring spirituality in New Orleans in a documentary entitled Spiritual YAYA. This project peels back the shroud exposing the spiritual mysteries of the city. It begins with mainstream spiritual events and then takes the viewer deep into the underground of local spiritual culture.
Uttermohlen is educated in photography with three undergraduate degrees in art from Shepherd University in West Virginia and a Masters in photography from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. She has served as an adjunct professor of photography at The Ohio State University, The Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio and Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Photo Lucida’s Critical Mass just named her as one of the Top 50 photographers through an international selection with 200 curators. https://www.photolucida.org/critical-mass/top-50/ . She has also earned two individual artist fellowships. One award was from the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the second from the State of Florida. She has a long exhibition record which includes places like Blue Sky Gallery in Oregon and some museums such as Museum of Art in Ft Lauderdale, FL and the Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati, OH
Her photographs are also in several collections including the New Orleans Museum of Art, United States Embassy in Moscow, Russia and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Collection.