Emma Powell

Emma Powell, one of the winners of the 2013 AlternativePhotography.com calendar competition has added her work in cyanotypes and wet plate collodion, exploring the connections with historical processes and cameras.
From: Ames, Iowa, USA.
Shows: Cyanotypes and Wet plate collodions.

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Emma Powell is a visiting artist and lecturer at Iowa State University. Her work often examines photography’s history while incorporating historic processes and or devices within the imagery. As an undergraduate at the College of Wooster, she studied the nineteenth-century spirit photography movement as a subject for her undergraduate thesis exhibition of wet plate collodion photographs. While pursuing her MFA at Rochester Institute of Technology, she expanded her interest in the intersection between historical and contemporary practice by examining the life of George Eastman in a series of photographs made through the viewfinders of old Kodak cameras. Her work has been shown in a variety of one-person and group exhibitions throughout the country, including her solo thesis exhibition A Life Reviewed: George Eastman through the Viewfinder at the George Eastman House in 2010. The photographs in her most recent series The Shadow Catcher’s Daughter, balance on the fine line between reality and the dream. She uses self-portraiture to articulate personal narratives, which are often both nightmare and fantasy. The cyanotype process, used in this series, obscures the subjects’ location in time and creates a backdrop for archetypal universal symbols.

Contact Emma Powell