The Work of Maggie Taylor

For more than nine years I have been using a flatbed scanner instead of a traditional camera as my primary tool for recording and interpreting the objects I collect. Many of these images begin with 19th-century photographs (tintypes, ambrotypes or Daguerreotypes) that I scan and enhance. I work very spontaneously and intuitively, trying to come up with images that have a resonances and a somewhat mysterious narrative content. There is no one meaning for any of the images, rather they exist as a kind of visual riddle or open-ended poem, meant to be both playful and provocative.

about the artist

Maggie Taylor was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1961, and graduated from Yale University in 1983 with a BA in philosophy. In 1987 she received an MFA in photography from the University of Florida. Since then her still-life photographs have been exhibited in more than 60 one-person exhibitions throughout the U.S. In 1996 and 2001 she received State of Florida Individual Artist's Fellowships. Her current images explore the use of a computer and a flatbed scanner in place of a camera. By placing objects directly on the glass top of the scanner she is able to create a unique type of digital image which has some photographic qualities.

Taylor's work is in the collections of The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; THe Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Mobile Museum of Art, Mobil, AL; Musee de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium; Museet For Fotokunst, Odense, Denmakr; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; NationsBank, Charlotte, NC; and the Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJ, among others.