Jean Pagliuso

Jean Pagliuso began her career in photography in 1969, quickly rising within the field of fashion photography. Her 30-year career as a fashion photographer broadened to include collaborations with the film director Robert Altman, as well as Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Disney. In the mid-nineties she departed from her earlier commercial and fashion work and began to experiment with different alternative printing processes, including photogravure.

Pagliuso says that moving to live each part of her year in New Mexico was life-changing, and her work has become informed by her investigation of the landscape of the Southwest. She began producing a new body of work inspired by the beautiful, crumbling ruins of Native American habitats, and later her theme broadened to encompass ritual grounds and civilizations of ravaged beauty all over the world: Belize, Cappadocia, Angkor Wat, India, Chaco Canyon, Egypt, and Machu Picchu.

Pagliuso works with a Hasselblaad camera and a Lotus 4x5 field camera. Experimenting with alternative printing processes and techniques for each of her projects led her to try handmade Kaji paper for her Cambodia and India series, producing engaging and ethereal images with incredible presence.

Jean Pagliuso's recent work has taken another distinctive turn and now consists of suites of strictly formalized portraits of birds. Her newer series, The Poultry Suite and The Raptor Suite, though seemingly uncharacteristic of her previous work, beautifully integrate this unique subject matter with her 30 years of fashion and formal portraiture.