You may have seen Allie Cottrill’s work.
If you’ve ever walked down the baby aisle in a grocery store or Target or Costco, the chances rise exponentially. Glance at the diapers. Every Pampers package with a photo featuring a baby and an adult was taken by Cottrill, a premier fashion and advertising photographer with a professional portfolio reaching back more than two decades.
Cottrill’s non-professional portfolio goes back even further, beginning on the campus of the University of Georgia.
“All the pictures of me with my friends in college, I was always the one with the camera on my shoulder,” Cottrill BFA ’88 says. She first developed an interest in photography while in high school in Virginia. That interest took off when she came to Athens and further blossomed during her senior year, when she studied abroad at UGA’s campus in Cortona, Italy.
“The whole time I was there, I was shooting,” Cottrill recalls. “I’d borrowed my dad’s cool little 35 mm Canon. I was doing a lot of writing for my art history courses, but I found I could express myself better through photos.”
Still, photography remained just a hobby. Cottrill came to UGA to study graphic design, and after graduating from the Lamar Dodd School of Art, she worked as a graphic designer and art director for more than 15 years.
Cottrill’s career was fulfilling, but she never put down her camera. When she and her husband, Geoff, started a family in the late 1990s, she discovered new layers of talent while documenting what she calls the “babyhood” of daughters Abby and Claire.
“Every day, I shot three rolls of film, just capturing these beautiful moments,” Cottrill says. “Now people shoot on their phones, and those moments are fleeting, but there is something about film that just stops time. So, I’m just grateful I have those pictures.”
In 2005, Cottrill began taking photographs professionally. Three years later, she was shooting full-time, and she knew where she wanted to go.
“I just didn’t want to just do portraits and things like that,” Cottrill says.
Those years in art direction and graphic design—skills she credits her UGA education for helping develop—gave her a built-in target.
“I wanted to get back into advertising. So, I focused on kids’ fashion.”
Within a year, she was shooting global campaigns.
“All the pictures of me with my friends in college, I was always the one with the camera on my shoulder.”
– ALLIE COTTRILL, FOUNDER OF ALLISON COTTRILL PHOTOGRAPHY
Many professional photographers will avoid working with children or babies. But Cottrill thrives in the environment.
“I’m always looking for a connection with the child,” she says. “Sometimes it’s making eye contact. Sometimes it’s the model in the space or the graphic design element. Maybe it’s the shapes or the negative space, then I’ll get goose bumps, and I know I’m close to it.”
Cottrill has worked with dozens of brands; a new campaign for a Pampers product line called Amore is the latest. Most of her work is in New York or Miami. She’ll shoot for a week every two months or so. The rest of her time is spent in planning and preparation.
In 2025, Cottrill and her husband moved from Atlanta to Massachusetts and settled on Cape Cod. She’s an hour’s drive from Boston, and three hours by train from New York, so work trips aren’t complicated.
Cottrill doesn’t get back to Athens a lot but tries to attend a football game each year. Despite that distance, her UGA experience remains close to her heart.
“That summer in Cortona, before I graduated,” she says. “That’s when I realized there was magic through a lens.”