JEAN PAGLIUSO
Born and raised in Glendale California in 1941, Jean Pagliuso started her art journey as an Applied Arts major at UCLA. In 1974 she moved to New York to begin a serious commitment to editorial fashion photography. Throughout these next 10 years, she photographed for countless fashion magazines, Madmeoiselle, Vogue, and NY Magaine among them. She began to merge her experience in fashion with work for major Studio films, the result being many movie posters most notably American Gigolo, Splash, and Heartburn. A substantial amount of this work was a result of a very fruitful collaboration with the director, Robert Altman.
A random trip to New Mexico in those early career days subsequently resulted in a second home in Santa Fe, NM. This produced a complete shift in photographic output. Just hours from her Santa Fe home she found exquisite Anasazi Ruins that remain archeological mysteries still. In 1997, Pagliuso’s attention turned to temple ruins and the endangered environments of Egypt, Mali, Peru, India and Burma. These landscapes became her major body of work, now executed with a much-researched photographic technique rooted in the 19th century photographic process. She began to coat rice paper with silver emulsion and return with total dedication to the analog darkroom process.
Upon her father’s passing, she plucked subject matter from her father’s obsession of raising show chickens and, what began as simply an homage, developed into its own specific genre, the Poultry and Raptor suites. This has been celebrated in a book eponymously titled Poultry Suite published 2015 and followed in 2017 by release of a Retrospective book entitled In Plain Sight.