“My work is a direct experience of light and the fragility of life through the seasons. Nature is a great teacher. Nature always reminds me of the fullness and vitality of life as well as the death and decay that dwells within every living thing.”[1]
Martha Madigan (1950–2022) is celebrated for her commitment to a multitude of technical approaches to the discipline of photography, from the oldest cyanotype processes to the latest advances in digital color photography. Her most celebrated works are the high-contrast photograms she created for over forty years that index the human figure, botanical forms and architectural structures.
Born and raised in Milwaukee, Madigan received her BS from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her interest in camera-less photography emerged during her graduate studies, when she produced her earliest mature photograms. In 1978, she was invited to photograph artists Alice Neel, Isabel Bishop and Selma Burke in the Oval Office with President Jimmy Carter. After moving to Philadelphia in 1979, Madigan authored a series of cyanotypes documenting the decorative ironwork of the city’s Falls Bridge, which was covered in climbing vegetation; other works from these years similarly capture cyclone fencing in Chicago and Detroit. In the early 1980s, Madigan began working with printing-out-paper (P.O.P.), which became her preferred material for the following decades. The artist began what would become her magnum opus in 1989, when she set out to capture large-scale “body print” photograms of the human figure from birth through age 100; created over the next three decades, Madigan’s Human Nature series constitutes a testament to the human life cycle and its place within the natural world.
Madigan explored a wealth of interrelated themes in her work, from birth, death, and rebirth to fertility and decay. The complexly layered exposures contained within each rectangle of P.O.P. reveal elegant formal incidents between the human body and botanical organisms, opening the implications of each image onto a host of interpretations pregnant with the weight of existential meaning. The artist often used her three children and the children of friends as
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[1] Martha Madigan, artist statement, http://www.marthamadigan.com/Madigan-full-CV.pdf, (accessed August 2022)