Elliott McDowell Retrospective

by Crave Staff

Currently AfterImage is showing Elliott McDowell’s work.  He has long been one of Santa Fe, New Mexico’s most entertaining photographers, known for his finely crafted images that abound with wonders, insights and riddles.

In the 1970s McDowell was an expert at traditional photography techniques, acclaimed for his impeccably printed photographs of quirky and playful subjects. A collection of these classic black and white works appeared in the book Photographs: Elliott McDowell (1981).  

Over the years McDowell’s silver prints evolved into a unique new body of colored photographs that resemble miniature stage sets of dreams and fairy tales. McDowell constructs these magical works from his large collection of color slides and digital imagery. A selection of these images can be found in his recent book Mystical Dreamscapes (2009).

This exhibition represents a 35-year span of McDowell’s imagery, both classic black and white and color photography as well as his more contemporary digital composite pieces. McDowell was born in 1948 and is a graduate of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.