Sandy Skoglund
1946–

Sandy Skoglund (born September 11, 1946) is an American photographer and installation artist. Her contributions to photography have advanced the medium as a form of conceptual art. She is well known for her intricately designed environments, which utilize painterly and sculptural techniques within staged and performative scenes. Photography critic Andy Grundberg notes that Skoglund’s work contains “all the hallmarks of the new attitude toward photographs: they embrace blatant artificiality; they allude to and draw from an ‘image world’ of endless pre-existing photographs, and they reduce the world to the status of a film set.”

The impact of Skoglund’s juxtaposition of commercial aspects, dramatization, and conceptual art elements, is described by curator Marvin Heiferman, who explains that “The work simmers down and reminds viewers of their smallness in a big, overdetermined world where consumer culture, nature, science, and their interior gyroscopes regularly spin out of control.”