Nancy Breslin

Nancy Breslin from Washington, DC, USA works with a variety of techniques, including pinhole, cyanotype and gum.
From: Washington, DC, USA.
Shows: Cyanotypes, Gum over cyanotype and Pinholes.

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Nancy Breslin lives and works in Washington, DC, USA. She came to photography after a first career in medicine, and her initial focus was traditional silver prints, mostly of circuses and amusement parks. But in 2002 she discovered pinhole photography, and has since also ventured into work with alternative processes such as cyanotypes and gum prints. Her largest current project is Squaremeals: A Pinhole Diary of Eating Out, which consists of pinhole pictures of nearly every meal she has had in a restaurant or friend’s home for over a decade. The long exposures create an oddly distorted “diary” since the objects of her attention at the meal (her friends and family) become ghostly, while items she may not have noticed become prominent.

She has turned to cyanotype when working on fabric suits the idea, such as the “Pillow for Wet Dreams” which features a roll of Holga negatives from the rue Saint-Denis in Paris (a red light district) contact printed onto silk and then sewn. When she shoots with color film in her Diana, some of the images end up as three color gum bichromate prints.

Nancy Breslin has taught photography at the University of Delaware and George Washington University, and given talks and workshops at several regional schools and art centers. She exhibits frequently, mostly in the mid-Atlantic region, including at the Biggs Museum, the Arlington Arts Center, the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts and Saint Joseph’s University. In her spare time she enjoys traveling and visiting galleries, and when she comes across interesting alt process work she sometimes blogs about it here.