Deborah Bright

Deborah Bright (born 1950) is an American photographer, writer, and educator. She is particularly noted for her imagery and scholarship on queer desire and politics, as well as on the ideologies of American landscape photography. Her work is in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other collections. Bright's photographic projects have been exhibited internationally.

Bright grew up in Washington, D.C. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Chicago in 1975.

Bright joined the faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989 with a joint appointment in History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) and Photography. She also served RISD in many other capacities, from department head to stepping in as Acting Dean of Fine Arts, until 2012 when Bright left RISD to become chair of Fine Arts at the Pratt Institute.

Deborah Bright is notable for her body of works regarding LGBT, queer, and women's right subject matter as well as landscape photography.

Gender and Sexuality

In 1989–1990, Bright created a series called Dream Girls which challenged mainstream gender-sex identities that the Hollywood industry in the 1980s chose to propagate. In this series, inspired by her adolescent fantasies, Bright recreated iconic Hollywood movie scenes of the 20th century, inserting herself in the film stills from the 1940s and 50s. She appears in place of the male character, speaking to themes of gender and LGBTQ+ subject matter.

While working on Dream Girls, Bright worked on another photographic series from 1996–1999 called Being and Riding. It focuses on her childhood obsession with horses and the gender role associated with it. The series featured plastic toy horses and female figures.

In 2008, Deborah Bright collaborated with other artists in an exhibition called the Pink and Bent: Art of Queer Women. The exhibition took place at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art on May 21-June 28, 2008. It was curated by Pilar Gallego and Cora Lambert.

From 2015–2017, Bright created a series of work using colored pencil and graphite on Bristol. The five works: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Bad Moon Rising, My Egypt, Funkflash, and Night Radio all work together to defy traditional gender norms.

In 2017, Bright participated in the Nasty Women project along with other female artists. The exhibition took place at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, New York

Landscape Photography

Deborah Bright's 1983 work, Bloody Lane, The Battle of Antietam, was displayed at the Smithsonian in 1992. It consists of six 13x19 inch selenium toned silver prints. The work was also displayed at the Siskind Center from September 10, 1993 – January 9, 1994.

Her installation piece All that is Solid was displayed from 1992–2001 in five cities throughout the United States. She installed each piece based on their location; Bright wanted the work to reflect the areas de-industrialization in addition to former industrial areas through the local details.

In Bright’s work Manifest the artist explores agricultural enclosures and family heritage in New England focusing on self definition and political enfranchisement centered on individual male property ownership. Her work was made around the same time as her All that is Solid piece in 2000-01.

From 2000-03, Bright created Glacial Erratic Series, which consists of nine photographs focusing on Plymouth Rock. For this body of work, the rock was cropped in a way that it is contained in its own enclosed space. In addition, it is visually apparent that rock did not belong there because it is different from the surrounding rocks.

Publication

• The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, 1st ed, Routledge, 1998.

Articles

• “Michael Bishop and The Mystique of Mediocrity,” The New Art Examiner, April 1979.
• “Reconsidering the Stieglitz Era,” The New Art Examiner, March 1980.
• “By Arrangement,” The New Art Examiner, February 1981.
• “Transformations in Photography,” The New Art Examiner, July 1981.
• “Before Photography,” The New Art Examiner, June 1982. “Double-Edged Constructions: The Work of Barbara Crane,” Afterimage, October 1981.
• “Once Upon A Time In The West,” Afterimage, October 1984.
• “Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen,” Afterimage, Summer 1985.
• "Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men", An Inquiry Into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography. Exposure 23.1 (1985).
• “Landscape As Photograph,” exposure, 25:1, 1987.
• “Public Projections and Private Images, Afterimage, May 1987.
• “The ‘Other Body’ of British Photography, Afterimage, November 1987.
• “Confusing My Students, Eating My Words,” exposure, 26:2/3, 1988.
• “Engendered Dilemmas,” Views, Spring 1989.
• “Paradise Recycled: Art, Ecology, and the End of Nature,” Afterimage, September 1990.
• “Wait Till Donald Trump Buys the Whitney,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 29:1, Winter 1990.
• "The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics", Art Journal, vol. 51, no. 2, 1992, pp. 60–71.
• “Reactionary Modernism: Lee Friedlander’s Nudes for the Nineties,”Afterimage, January 1993.
• “Sex Wars: Photography on the Frontlines,” Exposure 29:2/3, 1994.
• “Exposing Family Values: Family Photography and Sexual Dissent,” A Family Affair (Christopher Scoates, ed.), Atlanta: Atlanta College of Art Gallery, 1995.
• “Pictures, Perverts and Politics,” The Passionate Camera: photography and bodies of desire, Londonand New York: Routledge, 1998.
• The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, 1st ed, Routledge, 1998.
• “Souvenirs of Progress: The Second Empire Landscapes,” The Photography of Adolph Braun, Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1999.
• "Being and Riding", GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2000, pp. 479–488.
• "Horse Crazy", Horsetales: American Images and Icons, 2000, 22-31.
• “Back to Basics: The New Paintings of Julie Shelton Smith,” Rebuilding the Body: Julie Shelton Smith, Newport: Newport Art Museum, 2001.
• “Shopping the Leftovers: Warhol’s collecting strategies in Raid The Icebox I,” Other Objects of Desire, eds. Michael Camille and Adrian Rifkin, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
• "Queer Plymouth", GLQ: A journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2006.

• “PhotographingNature, Seeing Ourselves,” America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, Providence: RISD Museum of Art, 2012.

Exhibition History

• In 1987, Bright showed at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design gallery in a two-person exhibition with Jeff Weiss.
• Bright's work Textual Landscapes was held at the Binghamton University Art Museum from March 17-April 17, 1988
• In 1990, Bright showed in 4 photo feminisms, an exhibition featuring works by Bright, Diane Neumaier, Martha Rosler, and Clarissa T. Sligh, organized by Leigh Kane and Diane Neumaier for Rutgers SummerFest and the Berkshire Conference on the History of Woman, taking place at the Walters Hall Gallery, Rutgers Art Center, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
• In 1992, Bright showed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. her landscape photograph which was accompanied by a book Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography
• In 1996, Bright showed at the Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery in Syracuse, N.Y., in an exhibition with Tetsu Okuhara, Liz Birkholz, and Márcio Lima.
• In 2003, Bright showed in "Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self" at the International Center of Photography in New York.
• In 2006, Bright showed in "Photography and the Feminine" at Senac University's Photography Gallery.
• In 1985, Bright’s photograph was included in exhibition called, Wide Perspectives: 9 Viewpoints, in the Museum of Contemporary Photographs which included artists, David Avison, Barbara Crane, Ron Gordon, Oscar Bailey, Phillip Galgiani, Sandra Haber, John Schlesinger, and JoAnn Verburg.
• In 1985, Bright’s photography was featured in an exhibition called, Chicago Photographers Project, at the Museum of Contemporary Photographs

Awards

Selected Awards History

• Purchase Award, Illinois State Museum, 1980
• Artist Grant, Illinois Arts Council, 1983
• National Endowment for the Humanities, 1985
• Artist Grant, Illinois Arts Council, 1986
• National Endowment for the Arts, 1988
• David and Reva Logan Award, Photographic Resource Center, 1989
• New Forms Grant, New England Foundation for the Arts,1992
• Artist Grant, Art Matters, 1994
• John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching, Rhode Is. School of Design, 1995
• Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 1995
• Somerville (MA) Arts Lottery Grant, 1995
• Artist Grant, Massachusetts Arts Council, 1999
• Finalist, Visual Arts, Lambda Literary Awards, 1999 (for Passionate Camera)
• Artist in Residence Grant, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 2001
• Honored Educator Award, Society for Photographic Education Northeast Region, 2010
• Research Fellow, Photography, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK, 2012

Collections

Selected Collections

• Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
• Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL
• Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
• Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C
• Binghamton University Art Museum, Binghamton, NY
• Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, NY
• Addison Gallery of American Art Phillips Andover Academy, Andover, MA
• Boston Athenaeum, Boston, MA
• California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside, CA
• Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
• Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
• Rose Art Museum], Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
• State of Illinois Center Permanent Collection, Chicago, IL
• Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons College, Boston, MA
• University Art Museum, State University of New York at Binghamton, NY
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England