Artist Member
Vanishing Flora, Disappearing Jungle/ Las Plantas Muriendo, La Selva Desapareciendo – cover
Hand-dyed and woven cotton, Coptic binding
15 x 22 ½”
Vanishing Flora, Disappearing Jungle/ Las Plantas Muriendo, La Selva Desapareciendo – double page
Cyanotype and Van Dyke brown printing on paper
15 x 22 ½”
Uncovering Eden
Inkjet print and pastels on paper
10 ½ x 5″
Laura Blacklow 
Laura Blacklow is the author of New Dimensions in Photographic Processes, 5th edition, Focal Press, an imprint of Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group, New York and London, 2018. She also has been a professional artist for over 40 years. Her handmade, manipulated photographic prints and artist’s books have been shown internationally, and reproductions of her work have appeared in many publications, such as 500 Handmade Books, edited by Julie Chen, Lark Books, an imprint of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., NY, 2013. Her artwork has been collected by museums, such as the Fogg at Harvard; corporations, such as Doubleday Publishing; and individuals, such as Lucy Lippard and Sol LeWitt.
Blacklow teaches photographic printmaking and book arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, and has conducted workshops in numerous locations, including at Fotokids Original in Central America and at the national art college (I.S.A.) in Cuba. She was on the Board of Directors of Boston’s Photographic Resource Center, president of the local Artists’ Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and active in the Guatemalan Solidarity Committee.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Using historical and non-traditional photographic techniques, I combine drawing, printmaking, painting and photography, as well as, digital reproduction methods, to hand-make artist’s books and prints. While inspired by my visual and conceptual predecessors, such as the Romanticists, I concentrate on creating imagery that does not replicate art history but expands the visual field.
I am particularly fond of the book format because it offers the challenge of simultaneously juggling a variety of issues, such as considering the material relationship between form and content; sequencing a narrative while bearing in mind the unpredictable passage of time when each reader experiences the book; displaying flat art on the page and sculpture in the structure; offering tremendous author/artist control while recognizing the inability to strictly regulate how the viewer goes through a book. In addition, I like that a book is easily portable, readily shared, and is an intimate work of art that needs to be touched.
I often anchor pages with text, as in my artwork about Guatemala, a country where I have periodically volunteered instructing Mayan and economically marginalized youth for almost thirty years.