EILEEN QUINLAN (American, b. 1972)

This excellent introduction to the work and person of Eileen Quinlan is by Steel Stillman and appears in his interview with the photographer, published in Art in America (8 March 2011).

Eileen Quinlan describes herself as a still-life photographer. Born in 1972, she has become well known in recent years as one of a cohort of photographers—Walead Beshty and Liz Deschenes are notable others—who, following in the footsteps of practitioners from Moholy-Nagy to James Welling, have been disassembling the layered apparatus of photography (light, subject, optics, chemistry, bytes, the material image) and finding new means of expression.

Often stunningly beautiful, Quinlan’s work is surprisingly straightforward. She uses medium- and large-format cameras and studio strobes to shoot tabletop, house-of-cardlike worlds—angular constructions, staged for the camera’s lens, in which propped mirrors reflect intensely colored light, deep shadows, bits of fabric, reflective Mylar, wisps of smoke, photographs, and, especially, each other. The resulting images offer kaleidoscopic views into indefinite and often infinite spaces. Little is seen of the studio where they were taken or of the photographer who made them, though sometimes she leaves clues: specks of dust, a fingerprint, a crumpled paper towel, or the edge of a can of beans used to buttress a mirrored tile.

Quinlan shoots on film and avoids Photoshop for reasons more practical than nostalgic—she was professionally trained in the analog world and still knows where to find film.

Overall, there is an unexpected sincerity to her process. Everything you see happened just the way it appears. The wizardry is all in the setup. Quinlan plays hide-and-seek with the camera (I’ve never seen it, but I know the camera is there, deep in some reflected shadow) and invites us to play along. To look at her pictures is to parse their construction—a game for puzzlers yielding endless pleasure.

Quinlan grew up in Boston and in southern New Hampshire. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, graduating with a BFA in 1996. After moving to New York in 1999, she worked in advertising and fashion—and as an assistant to commercial photographers—before earning an MFA from Columbia University in 2005. In the last six years, she has had eight solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, including her first museum solo, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2009. Her work has appeared in dozens of group shows and is currently on view in “All of this and nothing” at the Hammer Museum in L.A. Quinlan was recently appointed co-chair of the photography department at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She is married to the artist Cheyney Thompson, with whom she has a three-year-old son, and lives and works in Brooklyn. 

See also Maika Pollack, “‘What Is a Photograph?’ at the International Center of Photography,” Gallerist, February 12, 2014. 

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