Bill McDowell

Description

Please note: This edition is a diptych of images as single print.

Bill McDowell is a photographer living in Plattsburgh, New York. This diptych of two images is from his project Ground, a series of photographs taken from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) archive of “killed” negatives. These negatives that had been damaged with a hole punch by the FSA staff in the 1930s. McDowell’s sequence of photographs relates to land and agriculture, and is mediated by the manner in which the killed negative’s black hole abstracts subject, space, and time. With this, he creates a dense narrative connecting contemporary and Great Depression Americas. McDowell is the 2013 recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, and has received the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, the New York Foundation on the Arts Photography Fellowship, as well as many other artist grants. McDowell’s photographs are represented in collections at the Yale University Art Gallery, the George Eastman Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. He is a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont. McDowell participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 1995.