Feature image: Port of Los Angeles, San Pedro, California, David Emitt Adams, tintype made on a 55-gallon steel drum lid
July 22, 2017 – September 2, 2017
For the series POWER, David Emitt Adams traveled cross-country and created images directly on 55-gallon oil drum lids using the wet plate collodion process. He hand-built an ultra large-format camera and used a mobile darkroom so that the photographs could be developed on site.
Adams is an artist whose current practice engages historical media in order to create an informed contemporary dialogue about photography’s past and present. Born in Yuma, Arizona, David obtained his Bachelors of Fine Art from Bowling Green State University in 2002 and Masters of Fine Arts from Arizona State University in 2012. He is the recipient of numerous award, including the Photographic Education’s Crystal Apple Award (for excellence in experimental b&w photography), the Magenta Foundation’s Emerging Photographers Award, and the Nathan Cummings Travel Award. David is a board member of INFOCUS, the Phoenix Art Museum’s photography association.
Adams’s work is exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, as well as numerous private collections. David has presented lectures on his work at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Medium Festival of Photography in San Diego, and the 50th Anniversary Society of Photographic Education Conference in Chicago. The Etherton Gallery in Tucson, Arizona and the Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico represent his work.
Adams is the recipient of NOPA’s 2016 Clarence John Laughlin Award juried by Steven Albahari, Publisher of 21st Editions | Od Review.
Read about Adams’s work in The Washington Post.