Artist Bio: Judith Preston is a photographer and educator who grew up in rural New England and now lives in Southern California. She first became interested in photography while pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in English from Keene State College in New Hampshire. Exposed to the work of Minor White and Ansel Adams as a student worker in the college’s audio-visual department, she began to pursue still photography as a visual avenue of communication. Her first serious work was a documentary project of photographs of the residents of a low-income housing project in a small town in Southern Vermont. Turning her attention to the Vermont landscape, she began experimenting with black & white infrared film as a way to express the spiritual quality of nature. Wanting to delve into the medium even further, she entered the graduate program in photography at Ohio University, Athens, receiving her MFA in 1986. Currently, she is interested in low-tech approaches to image-making such as the Holga plastic camera and non-traditional alternative processes. Since 1988, she has taught traditional b&w darkroom, color negative printing, digital photography, and the history of photography.
