Zoë Zimmerman
Zoë Zimmerman grew up in Taos, New Mexico where she began photographing at a young age. She studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design where she received a BFA in 1986. For many years Zoë concentrated on antique photographic processes and invented an alternate method of albumen printing which was published in Christopher James’ Photography textbook The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes as ‘The Zimmerman Method’.
Zoë’s work is widely shown and collected both nationally and internationally and is included in many public collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Harwood museum in Taos, The museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, The Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities in Austin Texas and many others.
Zoë continues to live, work and show in Taos, New Mexico.
Artist Statement
CovidVanitas: The self-Quarantine Still Lifes
The global pandemic of 2020 affected my household and my studio practice before most of the rural community in which I reside was fully aware of the imminent threat. My daughter returned home unexpectedly from her studies in a Covid-19 hotspot and we promptly quarantined.
On the first day of quarantine I began photographing the people-less quiet of a home and studio in isolation. The still lifes are a visual journal of days passing with little change but the weather and season and what was provided by a small plot of land in rural New Mexico. The quotidian and mundane were magnified as I turned my eye to what had previously been overlooked and barely acknowledged. There were natural events that occurred over time that were particular to place which I included in the slowly turning narrative of the images (a plague of moths, drought, an unprecedented snow in early September, flocks of songbirds falling dead from the sky) but ultimately the body of work speaks to a more global shared experience of this unfathomable time.
The images depict objects symbolizing the specificity of this era of social and physical isolation.
Website