[1] Her work is notable for her documentation of the artists who created the Northwest School, such as Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey.
[2] Born in 1924 at Seattle's General Hospital, her father Cecil Durand Willis ran a blueprint company while her mother Elizabeth Bayley was in the arts and crafts business.
It was thanks to her mother that she developed an interest in Northwest artists from the 1930s and interacted with photographers including George Mantor, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham and Hans Jorgensen.
M. Randlett (1996)[1] After graduating, she spent a short period working in a Seattle store before apprenticing with the fashion photographer Hans Jorgensen although she later explained that it was George Mantor who actually introduced her to the art of portraiture.
The following year she began to work under an agreement with the University of Washington Press where she took countless photographs for books on Northwest art, artists, landscapes and architecture.