White snow, blue sky, red barn, and dark mountains. These are the elements of classic Vermont winter scenes. You can enjoy these scenes all year and in the comfort of your own home through the photography of Betsy Melvin – whose work is on display until March 7 at The Art Gallery in Stowe.

For almost fifty years, Melvin has been photographing landscapes, mainly in Vermont. "I'm a purist," she says. "No gimmicks, just one filter for enhanced dramatic effect. I don't believe in doctoring the native beauty." Viewers may recognize many of Melvin's images because they grace thousands of Vermont homes. "We sell a lot of her pictures," says gallery owner Lillian Zuber. Melvin's photos also hang in schools in Milton, Cambridge, Jeffersonville, Essex Center, and Charlotte. 

Melvin, 85, is currently planning her next project – possibly a book containing her photographs and those of her late husband Tom, combined in a way to tell the story of their lives.   Both Melvins got started in photography when they were eleven years old – but at different ends of the world – he in Vienna, Austria and she in Springfield, Massachusetts. His first recognition was having a black and white photograph displayed in a Viennese photo shop window. Her first recognition was having a portrait of a summer camp bugler printed in the Christian Science Monitor. Tom fled Vienna when Hitler marched into Austria in 1938, learned English and portrait photography as a refugee in Lisbon, and continued his studies in portraiture in New York City. Then he settled in Philadelphia, where he ran a portrait studio for 26 years.

Betsy was a yearbook photographer in St. Louis and in Vermont, and she took photographs as the Essex Center correspondent for the Burlington Free Press and for the Suburban List, forerunner to the Essex Reporter. She also was the resident photographer at the former Magram's department store on Church Street.  Her landscapes correlated to Robert Frost's poetry have been published in two books, "Robert Frost's New England," 2000 and  "Robert Frost Country," 1977.  Several of the photographs in the books can be seen at The Art Gallery. For example, "Madonna Meringue," a rolling snowfield with three smothered spruces at the top of Madonna Mountain in Jeffersonville, is linked with Frost's "Fire and Ice."

Tom and Betsy met at a professional photographers' convention in 1971, married the same year, and opened The Artistic Alliance, their studio and gallery on Route 15 in Essex Center. They worked there together for thirty-five years. Housed in the former living room of the Melvin home, The Artistic Alliance was both a gallery showing some 500 "poetic pictorials" and a studio in which people sat for their portraits. Betsy's specialty was finding the pictorial images and clicking the shutter on scenes usually not far from where they lived. Tom made sure that these images were produced and properly presented. He also handled the copying and restoring part of their business. They worked together in creating portraits. "It turns out that the work we produced together is far better than what either of us had produced on our own," Betsy says.

Although not represented in the Stowe show, the Melvins' portraits are an important aspect of their documentation of the Vermont scene. Their portraits include R.M.P. (Pete) Donaghy, MD, founder of the division of Neurosurgery at UVM's College of Medicine, who built a laboratory nationally renowned for developing and teaching microvascular surgical techniques. John H. Davis, MD, another Melvin subject, was chairman of the department of Surgery at UVM, chief of surgery at the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont, and the first CEO of the University Health Center. The Melvins have photographed the presidents of Trinity College; Bishop Kerr of the Episcopal Diocese; Efrain Guigui and Kate Tamarkin, former music directors of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra; Hoppy Hopwood, the founder of the Pine Ridge School; Eugene Cenci, past manager of the Holiday Inn; Dave Johnson, former director of the YMCA; Vermont judges Ed Cashman and David Jenkins; pediatrician Donald Swartz; Dennis Lambert, former athletic director at UVM; and countless other people in the Burlington area.

One five-year project involved individual portraits of 300 IBMers honored for various achievements, like designing a new product or finishing work for a college degree. Betsy points out that, unlike the photos on many other "walls of honor" in the national corporate IBM system, theirs were all individualized- with varied poses and different lighting for each face. 

"We were interested in portraits that captured the real person," says Betsy. This means using lighting to minimize "unfavorable features," avoiding pre-set poses, and watching for characteristic body language. "We engaged people," she says. "They didn't know half the time that we had taken the picture."

Betsy is brimming over with plans for the future. "I have many more ideas than time," she says. Recuperating from a fall at her daughter's home in Tennessee, she says that besides the photographic biography, she's thinking about "a poetic view of America," a collection of the Melvin landscapes taken across the country when the couple were on contract with the Holiday Inn. She would also like to do a cat calendar – "not cutesy, but with wrinkles and beauty and all."

"Betsy Melvin: A Retrospective," at The Art Gallery in Stowe, 35 South Main Street, (802) 253-6007. Show will close on March 7, but may open again in the spring.

Barbara Leitenberg writes on senior issues for the Champlain Valley Agency on Aging. This article originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press.