Joseph E. B. Elliott

BACKGROUND Joseph E. B. Elliott is Professor of Art at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and an Adjunct Instructor in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Elliott specializes in photography of historic industrial and architectural sites. Over the past twenty-five years he has received numerous commissions from the National Park Service, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, University of Pennsylvania, and many private clients. His work is in the collections of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the Library of Congress, and several museums and universities. His photographs have been published in Smithsonian, Wired, and Metropolis magazines, and in several books. ARTIST STATEMENT My work resides at the nexus of documentation and art. Documentation implies an objective process in which information is recorded, analyzed, cataloged and communicated. It implies a clear-eyed, detached, non-judgmental approach. For many, art implies sentiment, romance, interpretation and representation for high emotional impact. In my experience art and documentation are not mutually exclusive, instead lying along a continuum. I attempt to make work that contains elements of both. My influences include the cool approaches of Walker Evans, Bernd and Hill Becher, and Charles Sheeler, as well as the formal virtuosity of G. B. Piranesi and the luscious intensity of W. Eugene Smith. Applying my practice to the recording and representation of the built environment, I am attracted by the material qualities of wood, metal, stone, and brick, and the formal qualities of structure, both utilitarian and aspirational. I want to reveal the function, beauty and wonder of what people have created.