Marian Howard
Summer Heat Feels Forever
Archival Inkjet Print
2022
Marian Howard is a fine art photographer residing in Philadelphia, PA. She received her MFA in Photography from the University of Delaware and explores subjective experience through lumen print photograms. She has taught introductory and intermediate digital photography courses at Salem Community College, Carney’s Point, NJ, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA, and Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA. Additionally, she has led various photography workshops in the greater Philadelphia region. She was a recipient of the 2022 Illuminate the Arts grant as well as awarded from the Saint Joseph’s University Adjunct Faculty Development fund in 2016. Currently, she is a full time employee working in Photographic Services for the City of Philadelphia. Her personal photography work continues to be exhibited and published nationally. She unwinds by reading, cooking, and being outside in nature.
My most recent project, The Periphery of Consciousness, is a series of silver gelatin lumen print photograms. In this work, abstraction functions as a subversive response to today’s post-digital world, countering our fear, anxiety, and mistrust of reality. I collaborate with natural elements, and play within the picture plane. I collect organic and inorganic detritus, and construct abstract landscapes intuitively. Free to roam, my imagination becomes sentient. I draw inspiration from personal experience and compose utopias of unique design. Since the digital revolution, our imagination is all that remains unmediated. It is important to recreate experience from imagination because the subjective is authentic and reliable. The Periphery of Consciousness asks the viewer to look to the edge of their awareness, where they will find the antidote to the post-digital condition.
