Liz Deschenes
1966 –

Since the early 1990s, Liz Deschenes has been investigating the histories of photography, film, and, increasingly, architecture and exhibition display. Using a wide range of analogue photography techniques, her often minimal, seemingly abstract photographs act as “the perfect container” for these investigations. Rather than presenting an image of something that happened in the past, Deschenes disrupts “the expectations that are brought to looking at photographic work,” asking viewers to reexamine history, context, and their own presumptions.

In recent work Deschenes has made photographs that respond to the sites in which they are initially exhibited. Untitled, a four-part photogram made for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, addresses the Museum’s Marcel Breuer–designed building, its home from 1966 to 2014. While photograms—a camera-less process in which photosensitive paper is exposed to light and then processed—traditionally have been used by artists such as Man Ray to record the outlines of objects placed directly on the paper, Deschenes’s photograms are made by exposing the paper outside at night, recording the subtle variations in available luminescence. The four vertical photograms of Untitled echo the stepped facade of the Breuer building as well as the bellows of a large- format view camera, of the type often used for architectural photography. Rather than simply fixedly recording the past, however, the mirrored surfaces of these photographs—which in the present reflect the spaces in which they are displayed— will oxidize over time. As Deschenes has explained, “The photographs simultaneously refer to their history, reflect the present, and will continue to unfold over time.”

Introduction

Liz Deschenes (born 1966) is an American contemporary artist and educator. Her work is situated between sculpture and image and engages with post-conceptual photography and Minimalism. Her work examines the fluidity of the medium of photography and expands on what constitutes the viewing of a photograph. Deschenes has stated that she seeks to "enable the viewer to see the inconstancy of the conditions of display, which are always at play but sometimes hard to see." Her practice is not bound to a single technology, method, process, or subject, but to the fundamental elements of photography, such as light, paper, chemistry, and time.

She has taught at Bennington College and was a visiting artist at Columbia University's School of Visual Arts and Yale University. In 2019, she was the Wolf Chair in Photography at Cooper Union. She currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and is a visiting artist in photography at Bard College. She lives and works in New York City.