Deborah Bright


Deborah Bright 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. Bright's photographic projects have been exhibited internationally.

Life and career

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 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. Since her retirement from Pratt, Bright lives in Brooklyn, NY and has resumed painting queer abstractions.

Artistic Works

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

Gender and Sexuality

''Dream Girls'' (1989-90)

Bright first gained renown for her series called Dream Girls, 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 Katherine Hepburn, in a fulfillment of lesbian desire that thematizes gender and LGBTQ+ subject matter.

''Being and Riding'' (1996-99)

While working on Dream Girls, Bright also worked on a similarly themed photographic series called Being and Riding, which focuses on a common female childhood obsession with horses. The series featured provocatively framed plastic toy horses and female figures.
In 2008, Deborah 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 along with other female artists. The exhibition took place at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, New York

Non-photographic works

Between 2015–2017 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 (1981-84)''

Deborah 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 10, 1993 – January 9, 1994.
Crow Agency: Battle of the Little Big Horn is part of her Battlefield Panoramas series, 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 1992–2001 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'' (2000-03)

From 2000-03, 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.

Publications

Edited Book