Artist Statement
As an artist, I am engaged with the poetics and the politics of technology as it intersects with the natural world. My photographs create anthropological documents that puzzle together fragments of our social interaction with the landscape. While the range of my subjects is diverse--from Catacombs to Abandoned Prisons to Contemporary Asia to the Archive--all my photographs connect to the interiority of place and the patterns that lie beneath surfaces and appearances.

 

 

Margaret Stratton has received five National Endowment for the Arts Awards in Photography, Installation and New Genres. Additional awards include Seattle Arts Commission "Public Works" Award, Best New Film/Video from the Canadian Film Board, and Directors Award from the Black Maria Film Festival, Los Angeles.

Stratton’s work has been exhibited at: Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York; New York University, New York; Smithsonian Institution and Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Berlin Film Festival; San Francisco Camerawork; and the Henry Gallery, Seattle.

Collections include: Library of Congress, Washington, DC; New York Historical Society, New York; Seattle Arts Commission, Seattle; Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago Art Institute; and Ellis Island Museum, New York.

Publications include: The Living and the Dead: The Neapolitan Cult of the Skull, University of Chicago Press (2010); Detained In Purgatory: America’s Abandoned Prisons, Light Work #110, Syracuse, New York (2000); Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photography (2002); Lesbian Art In America, Rizzoli Press (2000); Art, Document, Market, Science: Photography’s Multiple Roles, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (1998); and Reframings: New Feminist Photographies, Temple University Press, Philadelphia (1996).

 

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