Elizabeth Currier

www.ecurrierimages.com

To keep me busy on my family’s 1950 road trip to California I was given a Brownie Box Camera. On Route 66 I was reminded every minute that we were a long way from Kansas. Looking out the window at the sandstone bluffs, the Burma Shave signs, the dinosaur museums and the Teepee motels it was a world I could never have imagined.

As an Art History major at Columbia University I took a History of Photography course where I came across the mid-19th century western landscape photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, and the urban documentary images of New York’s Lower East Side by Lewis Hine.  My work at Teachers College provided access to the darkroom and that is where my love for photography took hold.

I am a photographic opportunist and my body of work derives from explorations of various themes through a variety of lenses and processes.  Edward S. Curtis’s Navajo-given name of Shadow Catcher might apply to anyone who stalks the light and the dark.

Not necessarily a direct influence, I have pondered the images of nuclear cooling towers of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the Parisian shops of Eugene Atget and marvel at the prescient imagination of those who recognized the evanescence of the mundane through time.  They have led me to find for my lenses a whimsy in the prosaic and utilitarian, from small to epic scale.  Capturing the ephemeral object and exploring alternative processes determine my avoidance of the cliché.