Lois Conner

Lois Conner (born 1951) is an American photographer. She is noted particularly for her platinum print landscapes that she produces with a 7" x 17" format banquet camera. She has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Recently, she was the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship. Conner's work has been shown at museums internationally and included in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the British Library.

Lois Conner received her BFA in photography from the Pratt Institute. At Yale University, where she received her MFA, she met and studied with Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson. She moved to New York City in 1971 where she worked for the United Nations until 1984.

From the fall of 1991 through the spring of 2000, she directed the Undergraduate Photography Program at Yale University, while also serving as a critic and teacher in the Graduate Program. Other teaching venues include Princeton University, Stanford University, the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and the International Center of Photography in New York. Currently she is teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

The Sackler Gallery in Washington (National Museum of Art) presented a retrospective of her work, Landscape as Culture, in 1993. Recent exhibitions include two solo shows in 2007: Twirling the Lotus: Photographs of China and Tibet in London, and China Lucida in Paris. A book of her work: China, The Photographs of Lois Conner, was published by Callaway Editions in 2000. Upcoming publications include: American Trees, Yale University Art Gallery, a book on the Lotus, and Beijing Spectacle-Ruination and Reinvention. Recent work has included a series of portraits of pregnant women.

Bibliography

• Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial (2014), Princeton Architectural Press, ISBN 978-1-616-89248-7

References

• Davis, Keith F. 'Wanderlust: Work by Eight Contemporary Photographers from the Hallmark Photographic Collection' (Kansas City: Hallmark, 1987), 81.
• Feinberg, Jean E. 'Wave Hill Pictured: Celebration of a Garden' (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 17-21.
• Princeton University; The Program in Visual Arts; Faculty, s.v. "Lois Conner". Accessed 23 November 2007.
• Union List of Artist Names, s.v. "Conner, Lois". Accessed 10 September 2006.