About the Artist
Annie Bates-Winship
Annie Bates-Winship is a fine-art photographer and collage artist based in San Anselmo, California, with a studio at ICB in Sausalito. She shoots intuitively, much like keeping a visual journal. With a camera in hand she is actively engaged with her surroundings, and photography is her way of connecting to the world and communicating what she feels. She strives to illuminate the simple beauty that is all around us: an unnoticed gesture, a part of the whole, or a world not seen before. A friend once said that looking at her photographs was like looking through a peephole into a secret garden. Annie was drawn to photography early. The impulse grew after her first photography class in junior college, and she went on to major in photography at the University of Florida. She showed her work first in Florida and then in the Bay Area, where she has exhibited for decades. Her work falls into three series. Everyday finds wonder close to home, from a Mill Valley stairway to Abbotts Lagoon and a lunar eclipse. Journeys follows her travels to Maui, the Cinque Terre, Paris, Nice and Greece. Collage layers photographs into new images, some embellished with Sumi ink. Annie is a member of Art Works Downtown in San Rafael, MarinMOCA, the O'Hanlon Center for the Arts in Mill Valley and the ICB Artists Association in Sausalito. She has had solo shows at Mill Valley City Hall (most recently April to May 2026), Tiburon Town Hall and many Marin venues, and has shown in group exhibitions at Art Works Downtown, O'Hanlon, MarinMOCA, Falkirk Cultural Center, the Marin County Fair and Atlantic Gallery in New York.
“Annie Bates-Winship is a Marin photographer and collage artist who shoots like keeping a visual journal, illuminating the simple beauty all around us, from Mill Valley stairways to Maui and the Cinque Terre.”
The Process
Inside the Studio
The Painting Process
Annie works the way other people keep a diary. She carries her camera everywhere and shoots intuitively, reacting to what catches her eye: candlelight at Fort Point, a chair painted with a Coca-Cola logo, a magnolia in bloom, the light over Abbotts Lagoon. Being behind the lens makes her pay closer attention, and that attention is what she wants to pass on. She looks for the unnoticed gesture, the part of the whole, the world not seen before. On her travels that means a lifeguard station on Maui, the blue sky over the Cinque Terre or toys in a Greek shop window; at home it means the stairways and sunsets of Marin. In her collages the photographs become raw material. She layers images, a plane wing with a compass, bark with a dragonfly wing, and sometimes embellishes them with Sumi ink, building new pictures that feel like dreams or memories. The goal is always the same: that people come away with new insight, another way to see the familiar.
