Bill McDowell: Ground

In Ground, Bill McDowell has assembled a series of rejected photographs, originally commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, bearing the dramatically representative punched holes through the negatives. Ground includes images by Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Paul Carter, Theodor Jung, Carl Mydans, and Arthur Rothstein many of which have never before been published. Interview by DJ Hellerman.

Bill McDowell is the 2013 recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, and has received the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, the New York Foundation on the Arts Photography Fellowship, as well as many other artist grants. He is a professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Vermont. McDowell’s photographs are represented in collections at the Yale University Art Gallery, International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Deichtorhallen Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Light Work, Wellesley College, St. Lawrence University, and Rochester Institute of Technology.          

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