Maggie Taylor
(AMERICAN, b. 1961)
In 1981 Maggie Taylor began to photograph while she was a student at Yale University majoring in philosophy. She primarily took photographs of suburban landscapes and strange objects found in yards. In 1985 she enrolled in graduate school at The University of Florida where she encountered a much broader acceptance of manipulated and fabricated photography, both among teachers and fellow students. Her work is featured in Adobe Photoshop Master Class: Maggie Taylor’s Landscape of Dreams, Solutions Beginning with A, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Album, Edizioni Siz, and No Ordinary Days. Taylor’s images have been exhibited in one-person exhibitions worldwide and are in numerous public and private collections including The Art Museum, Princeton University, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The Museum of Photography, Seoul, Korea. In 1996 and 2001, she received State of Florida Individual Artist’s Fellowships. In 2004, she won the Santa Fe Center for Photography’s Project Competition. In 2005 she received the Ultimate Eye Foundation Grant. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Maggie’s tools are a flatbed scanner, a small digital camera and a computer. Her materials are found at flea markets and garage sales. Since 2022, she has been using text-to-image AI programs to create elements for her digital collages. Individual objects can be generated, and 19th century photographs in Taylor’s collection can be blended with other images in AI to create different poses and expressions. Her inspiration often comes from the objects and old photographs she collects, mingled with her own dreams and memories. These images are open to interpretation by the viewer and they are meant to be both playful and disturbing. The finished limited-edition prints are made on an Iris inkjet printer on a slightly textured matte paper.
"I create images, and that is much more important to me than explaining what the images mean. There is just no telling what they mean to other people anyway." ~ Maggie Taylor
