Eileen Quinlan

Quinlan was born in Boston in 1972. She earned an MFA from Columbia University in 2005 and is based in New York. She initially photographed streets and people, but moved away from seeking subjects in the outside world and began constructing light, objects, reflections, and film within a restricted studio environment^*10. She has explained that her experience working in fashion and advertising was central to Smoke & Mirrors, and that the ampersand in the title was chosen to make it sound like a brand name^*20.

During the 2000s, digital manipulation and online circulation became commonplace, while artists increasingly treated photographs as objects, chemical events, and exhibition surfaces rather than transparent windows. Within this shift, Quinlan did not use a return to analog processes as a guarantee of authenticity. As the ICA Boston has noted, her photographs record a physical set and simultaneously transform it into an apparition whose spatial structure is difficult to identify^*2. Mirrors and film do not safeguard “truth”; they show how a photograph can record an actual setup and construct an illusion at the same time^*12.

Quinlan does not limit the subject of her work to “photography itself.” She has named material culture, aging, death, sex, motherhood, the environment, screens, and touch among her concerns^*20. These are not parallel themes added to the work. They change its locations, materials, and duration. Commercial lighting, a household yoga mat, a bathroom, her own body, and short periods of time between childcare responsibilities each determine the scale and form of the image^*21.

Why Use the Techniques of Product Photography?

Smoke & Mirrors uses colored gels, flash, mirrors, Mylar, fabric, and other techniques designed to make commodities attractive. No product occupies the center of the frame; only reflection, color, and gloss remain. The ICA Boston has described the works as close to “product photographs without products,” noting affinities with lipstick advertisements, album covers, screen savers, and modernist painting^*2. By retaining the techniques of advertising while removing the commodity, Quinlan makes viewers notice that their response may be directed toward gloss and color themselves, not toward a particular product^*11.

Quinlan has said that magazines and record sleeves, Amish quilts made by her mother and grandmother, the history of painting, and shadows in the woods all shaped her interest in abstraction. Her abstract photographs therefore emerge neither from an isolated inner vision nor from advertising critique alone. Inherited handwork, commercial imagery, painting encountered in museums, and small studio constructions occupy the same frame. Her view that inner vision is formed by the outside world explains why she combines shapes and colors drawn from different sources^*20.

Why Preserve Failure and Damage?

Quinlan uses expired film, scratches negatives with needles and ballpoint pens, exposes them to water, sand, or seawater, and allows development to go wrong. She does not romanticize chance. She has said that retaining material failure makes the artist’s hand visible and allows viewers to recognize that every photograph is produced through human intervention. Advertising photographs remove scratches and uneven development so that the commodity alone appears naturally attractive^*20. Quinlan reverses that process of removal, returning labor and failure to the glossy surface^*16.

Small marks, footprints, creases, and chemical spots interrupt a reading limited to smooth color fields. Quinlan has said that she wants viewers to consider where, how, and by whom a work was made^*20. Here photographic materiality does not mean merely that paper and film are physical objects. It refers to making scratches, uneven development, and handwork—features commonly removed from advertising and screen images—visible in the finished picture.

The Feminism of Sophia and Laura

MoMA discusses Sophia and Laura through feminism and material culture because their forms are built from a specific commodity, the yoga mat, and from women’s names. In Sophia, a mat associated with health, beauty, and self-management is folded and hung on the wall. The title refers to one of the women honored in Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party^*1. A contemporary product used to discipline the female body is overlaid with the name of an artwork intended to record women in history.

Laura photographs the same yoga mat on expired black-and-white Polaroid film. When the image failed to develop adequately, Quinlan scanned the film and added color digitally. The title refers to Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks^*1. Without showing a body, the work combines a product used to manage the body with the name of a television character whose death organizes the narrative. Feminism here is not a search for abstract forms that symbolize women. It is a method for asking, through material and title, how women’s bodies are seen through commodities, historical names, and popular narratives^*20.

After Motherhood, the Bathroom Became a Studio

The nude works made from 2014 onward began after Quinlan became a mother and found long periods away from home or in a studio difficult. She turned the bathroom into a studio, pressed her own body and those of friends against shower glass, and photographed them with obsolete black-and-white Polaroid film. Continuing to work between periods of childcare required a method that did not depend on a large studio, models, or a production crew^*3. The glass was an available surface close at hand, but it also flattened bodily contours and layered skin, reflection, and developing chemistry on one plane^*22. Instead of presenting the postpartum body as a clear full-length nude, she made the limits on working time and the body’s transformation part of the same form^*23.

These constraints of time and place are not treated as private circumstances outside the work. Quinlan translated the narrower range of movement and shorter periods of time that came with motherhood into the bathroom as a site, pressure against glass as a method, and Polaroid as a medium that could be handled quickly^*20. Later lecture descriptions extend her subjects beyond motherhood to bodily autonomy, the repetition of domestic labor, and the middle-aged body^*23. Feminism here is not a label attached to the works. It is a way of registering, through composition, material, and method, who can use which spaces and how much time for artistic production^*24.

Smoke & Mirrors

In Smoke & Mirrors, smoke and mirrors are physically arranged in the studio and rendered difficult to locate in depth through reflection and shallow focus. The title is both an idiom for illusion or deception and a phrase that sounds like a commercial brand^*2. The photograph records the physical facts of the set, but viewers cannot reconstruct the space from those facts^*4. This duality separates the fact that the camera recorded objects that existed from the judgment that the visible space is truthful^*5.

Sophia and Laura

In Sophia and Laura, abstract form never settles into a direct symbol of the female body. The folded yoga mat can resemble a commodity, fabric, skin, or landscape, while the title summons another history. Laura’s failed development and digital coloring add the palette and unstable memory of a television drama to the chance effects of analog film. Material, title, and process together show abstraction emerging from commodities and narratives around women’s bodies, not from a color field detached from social life^*1.

Broken Figure and Dune Woman

In Broken Figure and Attachment, Quinlan pressed bodies against shower glass and manipulated the developing chemicals of obsolete black-and-white Polaroid film. Body, glass, and emulsion overlap, making it difficult to distinguish skin from reflection or chemical irregularity. The Art Institute of Chicago describes the series as a meditation on motherhood in which layers of body, glass, and photographic material obstruct the viewer’s gaze. A clearly presented nude makes it easy to grasp the female body as a single form^*3. Quinlan uses the compressed glass surface and uneven development to interrupt that encompassing gaze and to keep the maternal body from resolving into either idealized motherhood or a sexualized nude^*22.

In Dune Woman, the nude photographs that began in the bathroom appear alongside sand, skin, and chemicals on film. The exhibition text compares the accumulation of domestic labor to the infiltration of sand and explains that the work emerged from the limited time of new motherhood. The home becomes a working environment that both enables and constrains production, not a private background detached from it^*21.

Refusing a Divide Between Analog and Digital

Quinlan does not treat analog photography as more authentic than digital imaging. She moves among expired Polaroid film, gelatin silver printing, scanning, digital coloring, and UV printing according to the work^*9. The criterion is not the preservation of an old technology, but whether a process can show where touch, damage, compression, or changes in color occur as bodies and objects become images^*10. Against the smooth flow of pictures across screens, scratched film and bodies pressed to glass retain evidence of contact and labor behind the image^*18.

Refusing to Treat Abstract Photography as Pure Form

Abstraction in photographic history has often been valued as a medium-specific experiment in light, form, and chemistry. Quinlan inherits that formal vocabulary while showing that the same color fields and reflections also capture attention in advertisements, magazines, album covers, and screen savers^*2. In her photographs, compositions recalling modernist painting and the gloss of product photography emerge from the same apparatus^*11. Instead of debating in general terms whether abstract photography is independent of society, each image lets viewers identify the lighting, commodity, body, and working location that produced its colors and forms^*12.

Feminism Through Childcare, Domestic Labor, and Working Time

Quinlan’s feminism cannot be reduced to references to Judy Chicago or to the female nude. A folding table, household materials, the bathroom, and her own body reveal unequal access to production budgets, space, and childcare time among artists^*20. She leaves short working periods, repetitive domestic labor, and the pressure of a body against glass visible in the finished work^*23. The critical force lies in making labor legible through location, scratches, glass, and failed Polaroids—labor that would disappear if these images were compared only by appearance with abstract photographs produced in large studios^*24.

Why Keep the Female Nude from Becoming Fully Legible?

Product photography is expected to present the commodity in an immediately graspable form; traditional nude photography often does the same with the body. Quinlan’s reflections, blur, glass, and chemical damage prevent the object from becoming legible all at once^*3. In the nude works especially, skin, reflections in the glass, and irregularities in the emulsion overlap, making the female body difficult to survey as a single closed contour^*5. This opacity is not decoration. It is a concrete photographic method for resisting a gaze that rapidly processes the body as an object of viewing or possession^*20.

Quinlan’s place in photographic history does not rest on reviving analog technique^*1. She treats modernist photographic abstraction, the seductive finish of advertising, conventions for viewing the female nude, and the time and space available to a mother as forces that determine the composition and material of a photograph^*10. Yoga mats, shower glass, the bathroom, and time divided by domestic work and childcare shape composition, camera distance, and development^*22. Instead of explaining abstraction solely through the artist’s interiority or the purity of the medium, she offers photographs that ask whose body and labor produced their colors and forms^*24.

The early Smoke & Mirrors works entered the collections of MoMA and SFMOMA and were received early on as studio-made abstract photographs^*6. SFMOMA’s collection record also presents works from this period within its photography holdings^*7. Frieze’s record of the photobook publication traces the early series and the later nudes as one continuous history of production^*8. In The Waves, Quinlan combined photographs with screens and exhibition space, extending reflections within the image onto the display surface^*9.

The later Good Enough distances itself from photography’s investment in perfect finish and affirms failure and responsive making through its title^*13. Too Much develops images in which objects, color, and bodies accumulate excessively^*14. Criticism of the exhibition discusses the coexistence of seductive surfaces and bodily pressure^*15. Mind Craft extended the relation among handwork, perception, and photographic material across the exhibition^*16. Contemporary Art Library’s documentation records the scale of the works and their placement on the wall^*17. Reviews of the exhibition read abstraction through touch and the body^*18. A lecture at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth provides the artist’s own account of the shift from early studio abstraction to motherhood and the body^*19.