Meet Emma Liz

This whole thing began because of a dog, the best dog. Roux (pronounced Roo) was the inspiration for Rouxby (pronounced Ruby — it’s confusing, I know). I got her as a puppy, all droopy skin and floppy paws and I called her Roux because I was in my early 20s and I’d just gotten back from backpacking through southern France where someone at a hostel told me it meant “redhead,” and she was. I bought my first camera because I wanted to take pictures of that puppy before she wasn’t a puppy anymore, and then people started asking me to take pictures of their dogs, and then people whose dogs I’d photographed got married and asked me to take those pictures, too. Like all of the best things, Rouxby the business happened organically. It didn’t start with a business plan, or an Instagram account (which had not even been invented yet), it started with what is still at the heart of every photograph I take: the desire to hold tight to the best parts of our constantly-changing lives.

Roux will turn eleven this summer, which means this business is nearly as old. That dog, and this career, have taken me through a nomadic existence (Roux and I once spent three months on the road with my best friend and her dog - we called ourselves the Four Crazy Bitches, spent less than $5/day on food and all four slept on air mattress in the back of my friend’s Toyota Highlander), meeting my now-husband, our wedding, a move to the Midwest, ping-ponging from Colorado to Ohio and back again (and again, and again), the birth of one baby, and then another.