Melissa Ann Pinney (born February 12, 1953) is an American photographer best known for her closely observed studies of the social lives and emerging identities of American girls and women. Pinney’s photographs have won the photographer numerous fellowships and awards, including Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, and found their way into the collections of the major museums in the US and abroad.
Melissa Ann Pinney’s work first garnered attention when it was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s major 1991 exhibition, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. Her evocative and sharply attentive photographs of the stages of life in American women earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999, enabling her to develop the work that resulted in her first major monograph, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls (Center for American Places, 2003). Since that time, Pinney has continued to follow those narratives, and the themes contained within them. This is an extensive body of work, some of which was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008 and at Alan Klotz Gallery in 2007 and 2009. Girl Ascending, the full span of this second phase in Pinney’s project, was published by the Columbia College Press in January 2010.
Table of Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Early animatronics and education
- 1.2 Influences
- 1.3 Early portraits
- 1.4 1980s street work
- 1.5 The Feminine Identity Series (1985–95)
- 1.6 Regarding Emma (2003)
- 1.7 Ballroom Dance Series (2007–10)
- 1.8 Girl Ascending (2010)
- 1.9 Cellar Door Series (2001-Present)
- 1.10 TWO (2015)
- 1.11 Two by Melissa Ann Pinney (2015-04-14)
- 1.12 Girl Ascending (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places)
- 1.13 Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls
- 1.14 Casual Sex?
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Biography
Early animatronics and education
Melissa Ann Pinney was born in St Louis, Missouri, the fourth of William Thomas Pinney and Mary Ann Hilburn Pinney’s eight children. A year after her birth the Pinneys moved to Scarsdale, New York. Six years later they moved to Palo Alto, California and subsequently in 1961 to Evanston, Illinois. Pinney was brought happening as a Catholic and attended high school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private academy for girls in Chicago. She went on to attend Manhattanville College– also a Sacred Heart school– in Purchase, NY, and next earned a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 1977. Pinney earned her MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1988.
Influences
Early on, Pinney was inspired by the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank, by the portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron and the street photography of Garry Winogrand and Helen Levitt. In auxiliary to these 20th century artists, the iconography of the Christian religious paintings from Pinney’s Catholic girlhood are the foundational images of her art.
Early portraits
Pinney’s first play a part to gain attention was a series of costumed black and white portraits of her female friends, made in locations vis-а-vis Chicago. These pictures were first exhibited in Breath of Vision: Portfolios of Women Photographers, at Fashion Institute of Technology Galleries in New York City in 1975.
In 1978 Pinney exhibited her Portraits of Evanston Artists at the Evanston Art Center, followed by series of large black and white portraits of relations and friends, “Remembrances.” The exhibition opened at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1982 and travelled to the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, Illinois, in 1983.
1980s street work
In graduate school, Pinney moved on from the medium-format portraits that had characterized her work, to pictures made in the flux of life upon the streets of Chicago. Her first project in this appearance were pictures made during the summer of 1983 at the Hamlin Park swimming pool, followed by a series of street carnivals shot mostly at night, images of her parents and siblings in Florida, and the beaches of Sarasota and Miami. By the mid-1980s Pinney had acquired her first Leica Camera.
The Feminine Identity Series (1985–95)
Throughout the 1980s, Pinney supported herself by functional as a photo-assistant and stylist for commercial yet and occupation photographers. She trendy commissions photographing weddings and parties, and started shooting in color for these jobs. Photographs of brides, their mothers and attendants made during these wedding assignments signaled the dawn of the “Feminine Identity Series”. Images from this series were included in Museum of Modern Art’s 1991 exhibition curated by Peter Galassi, Pleasures & Terrors of Domestic Comfort.
Regarding Emma (2003)
In 2003, Pinney’s first monograph, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women & Girls, (With a Foreword by Ann Patchett), was published by The Center for American Places. For nearly twenty years, Melissa Ann Pinney had photographed girls and women, from infancy to dated age, to Describe how feminine identity is constructed, taught, and communicated. Her produce an effect depicted the rites of American womanhood– a prom, a wedding, a baby shower, a tea party, and the informal passages of girlhood: combing a doll’s hair, doing laundry next a mother, smoking a cigarette at a make a clean breast fair. With each view, we get a greater harmony of the associates between mother and daughter, and by augmentation the larger world of family, friends, and society. Pinney’s contact to interpreting girlhood became more complicated and complex when her daughter, Emma, was born in 1995. Emma’s childhood evoked in Pinney her own girlhood and gave her act out new meaning and purpose. Ultimately, Regarding Emma shares with whatever of us the incremental and the ritualistic changes that accept place in a woman’s life on height of time.
Ballroom Dance Series (2007–10)
These pictures of teenager people negotiating their first formal actions were made during Ballroom Dance Class at the Woman’s Athletic Club, a graduation dance at the Hilton Chicago and B’nai Mitzvah parties in Chicago and Evanston.
Girl Ascending (2010)
Girl Ascending (With a Foreword by David Travis) was published by The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago in 2010. The take effect in Girl Ascending focuses on a touchstone moment in the lives of American girls and women: their emergence from protected puberty to public maturity. In these pictures Pinney portrays the uneasiness of that emergence in the torment yourself to fit ideal dresses to genuine bodies, proper etiquette to ebullient energies and appetites, natural companionship to formal conversation as the girls prepare themselves for the burning of their lives. Girl Ascending can be seen as a continuation of Pinney’s widely praised first book, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls. “The strength of Pinney’s con has always lain in her realization to sympathetically inhabit the lives of her subjects, while deal their place in the larger ebb and flow of social life just about them,” photographic and cultural historian Peter Bacon Hales has written. “The pictures are hence often lovely in their manner, and unbearable in their implications; rarely accomplish we look photographs that can imply in view of that much without intruding or announcing their intentions. A major contribution to neo-documentary photography, Melissa Ann Pinney’s Girl Ascending confirms her place among the top rank of photographers in action in the further century.” As David Travis writes in his introduction, “Pinney has regained that suitability of wonder, making her view of girls ascending into youngster women both believable and enchanting”.
Cellar Door Series (2001-Present)
Pinney made the first characterize in the Cellar Door Series in May, 2001. After celebrating her daughter Emma’s sixth birthday behind a backyard party, Emma climbed up on the archaic cellar door. Pinney was inspired by Alfred Stieglitz’s 1921 portrait of Georgia Engelhard to make a picture. Afterward, Pinney fixed to continue the project, at first later a year and subsequently once every season or so. Emma is now twenty one years old; the photographs span beyond a decade from 2001 to 2016 and continuing.
TWO (2015)
TWO, edited and introduced by Ann Patchett demonstrates the duality in our contact and in the world that surrounds us. The photographs are of pairs—mostly, but not always human—that display or imply elusive links of mind, of spirit, or of straightforwardly of the fighting of being. Photographs include children at play, aging friends, parent and child, couples in love, two nesting tea cups, twin teen-age boys, two chairs in autumn, among many others. The photographs are laid out in sudden sequences, with an essay placed between each sequence. The essays by the contemporary writers, Billy Collins, Edwidge Danticat, Elizabeth Gilbert, Allan Gurganus, Jane Hamilton, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth McCracken, Maile Meloy, Susan Orlean, and Richard Russo.
Last update 2021-08-06