Lecture with Meghann Riepenhoff

4:30pm, October 19, 2019

Meghann Riepenhoff creates large scale cyanotypes that respond to the very roots of photography—cameraless experimentations made with light and chemistry. Her practice considers our complicated relationship with the environment around us, impermanence, and the role images play in mediating the human experience.

Meghann is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of numerous grants and awards. She was a Critical Mass Top 50 Photographer, received a Fleishhacker Foundation grant, was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Art, and an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is based in Bainbridge Island, WA and San Francisco, CA, originally from Atlanta, GA.

Practice, Process, Influence

Meghann’s lecture Practice, Process, Influence caps a full day of artist lectures on October 19, 2019. She will discuss her early color photograms, influences, history with artist books, and her current work—cameraless cyanotypes made in collaboration with the landscape. During her lecture, she will site influences such as Anna Atkins, James Turrell, Rebecca Solnit, Catherine Wagner, as well as scientific images throughout the history of photography, contextualizing her work from the color darkroom to books to cyanotypes. Experimentation, failure, and time will be prominent themes in the talk, as Riepenhoff traces the lineage of work that yielded her current work. Riepenhoff will discuss images as impermanent objects, books as time-based experiences, and attempts to image/imagine the geologic time scale. 

Meghann Riepenhoff

Meghann received a BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and published in ArtForum, Aperture PhotoBook Review, The New York Times, Lenscratch, The Guardian, Photograph Magazine, among other prominent publications. Her photographs are in the collections of the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Worcester Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In 2019 she had her second solo exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City, and is looking forward to presenting a lecture about her recent work at Medium.