Shawn Ehlers worked as a model with the fashion photographers, Helmut Newton, Albert Watson, Olivero Toscani, wearing the elegant designs of Giorgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld and Donna Karan. While studying photography at ICP in New York City she found a point of focus by marrying the photographic techniques she absorbed and the aesthetics of form and line in fashion.

As a child she would travel from New York to Southern Florida to see her grandparents but it was always the natural beauty of Northern Florida that moved her. The Spanish moss, expansive beaches with the ancient coquina, palmetto hammocks and the roar of the Atlantic Ocean remained in her memory. She always thought that she would return one day to the area on a more permanent basis. When she did she began to capture this extraordinary landscape on film with a pinhole camera and an old Nikon FG-20.

She became very inspired while walking the beaches near Matanzas Inlet and decided that using the backdrop of the stark white sands would be perfect for a series of shell photographs she was planning on shooting. Her macro photographs of the shells reveal the clean simple lines, curves and angles created by nature. These ethereal, dreamlike close ups expose the perfections and imperfections of life and the exquisiteness of both.

Her visual sources are finely attuned to the natural world, having almost always lived by the sea. There is no contrivance in her imagery as she has a personal clear image of nature, be it a shell, rock or cloud. Her sense of form, composition and light is pleasing and sensuous. Her photographs offer a rhythm of elegant vision.