About

Jean Pagliuso (b. 1941, California) is an acclaimed artist who has photographed fashion, film, and celebrity portraits since the 1970s. Her photographs have been published in Vogue, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone. She has collaborated with film director Robert Altman and film studios, including Disney, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Brothers. Pagliuso’s photographic work of the last ten years, influenced by her extensive travels to Cambodia, India, Turkey, Mexico, and Peru, addresses the themes of time, nature and decay. Through these experiences, places of ritual and endangered environments intrigued her. She works most often with a Hasselblad camera, experimenting with printing papers and techniques for each of her projects. Pagliuso’s work can be found in collections around the world, including Susan Sarandon, Robert Altman, John Alexander, Edie Baskin, Eric Fischl & April Gornik, Agnes Gund, Kelly Klein, Bette Midler, Pfizer, Mobil Corporation, Jann Wenner of Wenner Media, and more.

 
Jean Pagliuso with Father and Chicken

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.