Selected Works

Clare Mowbray was a photographer from her early childhood, carrying her beloved Brownie camera everywhere, trying to capture the beauty she saw in the world around her. She became a teacher and guidance counselor, married, had a son, but never stopped taking pictures. In the 1970's she earned a MAFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. She and her family moved to New Hampshire, where they settled into a converted stone church. The NH winters made her long for warm Caribbean waters, so she began exploring every island she could. Snorkeling became her passion and photographing the underwater world was a natural offshoot of that. In 2004 she and her husband, Larry, bought a house on Vieques. Soon she was spending all winter on the island, snorkeling and shooting photos every day. Everything changed in 2009, when she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer. Her treatments only allowed her to return to the island for a few months at a time. In 2010, however, just down the road from her NH home, she discovered the incredible beauty of water lilies in a local pond. The beauty she recorded became her new passion that she had to share. In 2013, just weeks before her death, she published "Under White Oak Pond", a collection of these images. Some of the images on display are from that book. The rest are gleaned from the thousands of photos she took right here in the Vieques waters.