Deanna Miesch - Collected Works

Deanna Miesch, multi media artist and art therapist, is publishing her first book in a series of select photographs spanning three decades. Miesch retains a command of film photography in a now digital world. Nearly half of the 229 images are double-exposures created "in-camera" and without digital manipulation. The artist's double exposure work give both her portraiture and landscape photography otherworldly dimensions constructed from ordinary elements. The result is thematic and...
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Deanna Miesch, multi media artist and art therapist, is publishing her first book in a series of select photographs spanning three decades. Miesch retains a command of film photography in a now digital world. Nearly half of the 229 images are double-exposures created "in-camera" and without digital manipulation. The artist's double exposure work give both her portraiture and landscape photography otherworldly dimensions constructed from ordinary elements. The result is thematic and contextual richness that maintains a clear stylistic vision, delivering unexpected and enchanting stories. Miesch explores documentary, landscape, portrait, and social commentary in her photography using black and white, color, and infrared films. Miesch also uniquely presents some photographs as if they were Polaroids or postcards, with accompanying text typed by the artist from a 1930's Underwood typewriter. This technique demands an intimacy with the photographic subject and text, giving a rich and intimate perspective on her body of work, and the artist herself. These images have the unique ability to entrance both the studied and casual viewer alike. Visual journeys take us from Mamou, Louisiana and men making Gumbo from stolen chickens, to the dark and light sides of Mardi Gras and cemeteries in New Orleans. We meet nuns both at the Vatican in Rome, and making lace on the beach in Lido, Italy. Miesch journeys from the turmoil of a Klan rally protest in Austin, Texas, to a West Texas lightning storm in the Davis Mountains, and onto the middle-of-nowhere Utah. The natural grandeur of Big Sur and Bolinas, California are exposed, as is a magical and remote topography in Sonoma County, where Mars research teams study microscopic "extremeophiles" in a pristine and extreme alkaline environment with serpentine rock formations that mimic erosion patterns on Mars. This book is Miesch's encounter with life.