Photo_website

Emma Powell – Assistant Professor of Art at Colorado College

Photography, Basic Graphics

Education

  • B.A. The College of Wooster, 2008
  • M.F.A. Rochester Institute of Technology, 2010

Emma Powell’s artwork 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, Europe and Canada, 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 In Search of Sleep, 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 historic cyanotype process, used in this series, obscures the subjects’ location in time and creates a backdrop for archetypal universal symbols.

Emma is represented by the Lionheart Gallery