on social media
Amanda Bellamy is a film and digital photographer with a focus on documentary and lifestyle photography based in Sacramento, California. Amanda started shooting film in 2002 and followed her passion for photography into college. It was there that she learned how to develop and print her own work, both in color and black and white. As the technology began to shift, she honed in on perfecting her digital work, but there continued to be a strong pull to shoot film as her preferred method of bringing her art to life.
After experiencing a traumatic event that left her creatively barren in her mid-20s, Amanda put her camera down for a few years and focused on motherhood and her growing family. It wasn’t until one night in January of 2018 at 3 a.m. that her creative fire was reignited after watching a documentary about the late photographer Vivian Maier. Amanda was inspired to purchase her first medium format TLR camera, similar to the one Vivian Maier used to quietly capture the world around her. Amanda quickly realized after shooting her first roll of film through the Minolta Autocord that it was broken. The camera would create multiple exposures at random without the ability to control the outcome. Instead of letting this mishap defeat her, she decided to use this defect to her advantage, learning how to create something beautiful out of brokenness and tweak the perspective of her images.
Whether it be documenting motherhood, ordinary daily life, or her fellow artists, Amanda continues to specialize in allowing the unexpected to inspire her. “Nothing is perfect,” she says. “The beauty is in the process.”
