Deborah Bright

Deborah Bright (born 1950) is a 20th-century American photographer and artist, 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 Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Since her retirement from Pratt, Bright lives in Brooklyn, NY and has resumed painting queer abstractions.

Artistic works Bright is notable for her writing and photographic bodies of work on LGBT, queer, and women's rights subject matter, as well as for her writing about and work on landscape photography.

Gender and sexuality

Dream Girls (1989–1990) Bright first gained renown for her series called Dream Girls (1989–90), which challenged mainstream, heteronormative gender-sex identities propagated in Hollywood movies. Inspired by her adolescent fantasies, Bright recreated iconic Hollywood movie scenes of the 20th century, inserting herself into film stills from the 1940s and 50s. She appears in place of such iconic romantic male leads as Spencer Tracy and Rock Hudson opposite their female counterparts, including Katharine Hepburn, in a fulfillment of lesbian desire that thematizes gender and LGBTQ+ subject matter.

Being and Riding (1996–1999) While working on Dream Girls, Bright also worked on a similarly themed photographic series called Being and Riding (1996–1999), which focuses on a common female childhood obsession with horses. The series featured provocatively framed plastic toy horses and female figures.

In 2008, Bright collaborated with other artists in an exhibition called 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 and was curated by Pilar Gallego and Cora Lambert.

In the wake of the 2016 Presidential election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, Bright participated in the Nasty Women project (2017) along with other female artists. The exhibition took place at The Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, New York

Non-photographic works Between 2015 and 2017 after her retirement from Pratt, Bright began creating a series of works using colored pencil and graphite on Bristol board. The five works, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Bad Moon Rising, My Egypt, Funkflash, and Night Radio, all work together to defy traditional gender norms.

Landscape photography Battlefield Panoramas (1981–1984) Bright's 1983 work, Bloody Lane, The Battle of Antietam, was displayed at the Smithsonian in 1992. Bloody Lane consists of six 13x19 inch selenium toned silver prints, which are part of her Battlefield Panoramas series. The work was also displayed at the Siskind Center from September 1993 – January 1994.

Crow Agency: Battle of the Little Big Horn is part of her Battlefield Panoramas series (1981–84), which references the nineteenth-century panorama photography tradition of Edweard Muybridge and William Henry Jackson. This color photography series represents a bodily immersion view of the battlefield from the perspective of those on the ground fighting rather than from the traditional landscape perspective from on high. The views are dominated by the tall grasses and draws of the Montana landscape.

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

Manifest Series In Bright's Manifest series the artist explores agricultural enclosures and family heritage in New England symbolized by the omnipresent stone walls, and focuses 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.

Glacial Erratic (2000–2003) From 2000 to 2003, Bright created Glacial Erratic, which consists of nine photographs of Plymouth Rock at different tides and times of day, akin to Claude Monet's series of Cathedral and Haystacks 19th-century Impressionist paintings. For this body of work, Bright photographed the rock in tight framing that reveals the iconic rock's containment within a metal fence and secured as a tourist site. The rock's difference from the surrounding geological landscape reveals its displacement. "Photographing Nature, Seeing Ourselves," America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, Providence: RISD Museum of Art, 2012.

Awards 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 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 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