My interest in art began when I was a small child. My mother used to take my sister and me to all the museums in driving distance from our home in Albany, NY, and we would spend afternoons copying paintings first with crayons and then with charcoal and finally, when we were older and more experienced, with pastels. This pretty traditional artistic preparation took an unexpected course once I started making photographs an a teenager but the familiar canvases of my childhood heroes- John Singer Sargent, Whistler, Vermeer- still have their influences today: I am interested in making intimate, psychological portraits, where environment plays a large role. For subject matter I use what I have at hand: family, friends, and more recently- babies and small children. While the greater themes in my work have been fairly consistent over time the newer subject matter also focuses on the intense and highly charged experience of childhood and having children. This image is part of a series that will be published as a monograph in 2014 by Damiani.
Awards Jessica Todd Harper’s photographs have been discussed in The New Yorker, Photo District News, Camera Austria, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others. Harper’s first monograph, Interior Exposure, (Damiani 2008) was selected by O, The Oprah Magazine as well as PDN as a top book recommendation, was shortlisted at the NY Photo Festival for Best Book and won a first place Lucie Award. Her work recently appeared in museums across the country in both “Masterpieces of American Photography”, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film’s traveling exhibit, and in “The Art of Caring” The New Orleans Museums of Art’s traveling exhibit. She has had solo shows at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Cohen Amador Gallery in NYC, The Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, The Allentown Art Museum, and at Galerie Confluence in France, among others. She was a project competition winner at Center, Santa Fe and one of “PDN’s 30: Our Choice of Emerging Photographers to Watch”. Editorial clients include New York Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Die Zeit Literatur and Newsweek. Her work won a first place for the 2010 Society of Publication Designers competition. A New York Photo Festival award winner (Best Fine Art Image 2008) and a 2009 recipient of a PA Council for the Arts Grant, Harper has been invited to talk about her work at such places as The International Center for Photography, New York, NY; Google Headquarters, Palo Alto, CA and Aperture Gallery, New York, NY. Harper has taught at both The ICP and Swarthmore College. Her next book (Daminai Editore) is due out in Fall 2014 and will include a foreword by Alain de Botton and an essay by Alison Nordstrom. She is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC.
