Shannon Ebner

Last updated
Shannon Ebner
Born1971 (age 51–52)
NationalityAmerican
Education Yale University
Known forPhotography and poetry

Shannon Ebner (born 1971) is an American artist based in Los Angeles. She was born in Englewood, New Jersey. Ebner's artwork takes the form of photographs and poems that question the limits and ambiguity of language. [1]

Contents

Career

Ebner received her BA degree from Bard College in 1993. [1] Before she entered Yale University in 1997, she stopped her photographic practice to focus more on her work as a poet. [2] She participated in the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York and worked for the writer Eileen Myles. Although Ebner is no longer a poet, she takes her inspiration from poems and looks for ways to include poetry within her photographic work. [3] She graduated from Yale in 2000. [4]

From 2010 to 2018, Ebner taught the University of Southern California's Roski School of Art and Design. In 2018 she was named chair of Pratt Institute's photography department. [5]

Process

Ebner takes her photographs in black and white. In an interview with Mousse Magazine, Ebner explained that she believes black and white "means a way of seeing the world that doesn't exist in reality; it's a way of seeing the world that is about difference." [6]

Ebner claims a photographer always has the choice to keep the colour or discard it. This means that the choice between colour and black & white is always an act of discarding the color information of the images. For Ebner, photography is about the lines of action: writing with blank ink on a world that's in shades of grey. [6]

Themes

Portraits

The first well known portrait made by Shannon Ebner is called: Portrait of My Ex-Girlfriend (1998). The picture was taken while she was a graduate student on Yale's MFA program. Ebner placed the picture in a jar of water and left it there while she embarked on a road trip to Nova Scotia where she hoped to meet Robert Frank. When she returned, she took the lid off the jar exposing the blurred picture resulting to be Portrait of My Ex-Girlfriend. [7]

The submerging of photographs in jars filled with water is a method that Ebner kept using during her career. The photograph Paging Walter (2009) was made the same way. Ebner shot a portrait of Walter Benjamin and exposed the picture to the same process: because of the solubility property of water, the photographs emulsion sloughed off, leaving behind a ghostly trace of the original print. [7]

Language

Language is the main subject in the photography of Ebner's career. Her work is an exploration of language and sign systems. "Ebner often takes symbolic or linguistic signifiers and detaches them from their usual contexts. She uses language in unexpected and multi-layered ways, with puns, palindromes and borrowed phrases." [7]

Public collections

Ebner's work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art [8] and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothea Lange</span> American photojournalist (1895–1965)

Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.

Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catherine Opie</span> American fine-art photographer (born 1961)

Catherine Sue Opie is an American fine-art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles.

Lee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs. His work is characterized by its innovative use of framing and reflection, often using the natural environment or architectural elements to frame his subjects. Over the course of his career, Friedlander has been the recipient of numerous awards and his work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graciela Iturbide</span> Mexican photographer (born 1942)

Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in many major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The J. Paul Getty Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judith Joy Ross</span> American portrait photographer (born 1946)

Judith Joy Ross is an American portrait photographer. Her books include Contemporaries (1995), Portraits (1996), Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools (2006) and Protest the War (2007), "exploring such themes as the innocence of youth, the faces of political power, and the emotional toll of war".

Lois Conner is an American photographer. She is noted particularly for her platinum print landscapes that she produces with a 7" x 17" format banquet camera.

Taryn Simon is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, text, sculpture, and performance.

Katy Grannan is an American photographer and filmmaker. She made the feature-length film, The Nine. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Dawoud Bey is an American photographer and educator known for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits, including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects. In 2017, Bey was named a fellow and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is regarded as one of the "most innovative and influential photographers of his generation".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Wilkes Tucker</span> American curator of photography

Anne Wilkes Tucker is an American retired museum curator of photographic works. She retired in June 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Ewald</span> American photographer and educator

Wendy Ewald is an American photographer and educator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Benson (photographer)</span> American photographer and printer.

Richard Mead Atwater Benson was an American photographer, printer, and educator who used photographic processing techniques of the past and present.

Gary Schneider is a South African-born American photographer known for his portraiture and self-portraits. According to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which awarded him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, his "early work in painting, performance, and film remain integral to his explorations of portraiture. He strives to marry art and science, identity and obscurity, figuration and abstraction, the carnal and the spiritual."

Rochelle Feinstein is a contemporary American visual artist that makes abstract paintings, prints, video, sculpture, and installations that explore language and contemporary culture. She was appointed professor in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 1994, where she also served as director of graduate studies, until becoming professor emerita in 2017.

Deborah Luster is a photographic artist from Northwest Arkansas, US, and has been a professional photographer since the 1990s. Luster has at least one book in print, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, and is known for using older technology such as tintype to document and artistically portray violent crime and related topics. She is published and discussed in various international media such as The Economist, educational sources such as the John Simon Guggenhiem Memorial Foundation, galleries such as the Jack Shainman Gallery and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LaToya Ruby Frazier</span> American artist and professor of photography

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

JoAnn Verburg is an American photographer. Verburg is married to poet Jim Moore, who is frequently portrayed as reading the newspaper or napping in her photographs. She lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota and Spoleto, Italy.

Deana Lawson (1979) is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.

Mary E. Frey is an American photographer and educator who lives in western Massachusetts. Her staged scenes of mundane middle-class life, using family, friends and strangers, which appear to be documentary at first sight, are intended to address "the nature of the documentary image in contemporary culture."

References

  1. 1 2 "Shannon Ebner". Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2019-04-13.
  2. ↑ Lange, Christy (April 1, 2010). "No End in Sight". Frieze Magazine. Retrieved March 2, 2020.
  3. ↑ Lange, Christy. "No End in Sight". Frieze. No. 130. ISSN   0962-0672 . Retrieved 2020-03-02.
  4. ↑ "Shannon Ebner" (PDF). Retrieved March 2, 2020.
  5. ↑ "Shannon Ebner Named Chair of Pratt Institute's Photography Department". Artforum. 2018-05-25. Retrieved 2019-03-03.
  6. 1 2 Anastas, Rhea (2015-12-28). "Shannon Ebner "A Public Character" at ICA, Miami". Mousse Magazine. Retrieved 2019-04-13.
  7. 1 2 3 Lange, Christy (2010-04-01). "No End in Sight". frieze.com. Retrieved 2019-04-13.
  8. ↑ "Shannon Ebner". www.whitney.org.
  9. ↑ "Shannon Ebner: Instrumentals". Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. 2013. Retrieved 2019-04-13.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.