“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]

It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Martha Madigan (August 17, 1950–August 22, 2022), a dear friend, educator, and experimental artist who produced an innovative body of photographic works. Madigan 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. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery proudly represented Madigan for more than fifteen years. Director halley k harrisburg reflects on her career: “Through her commitment to the natural world and her passion for the beauty she found in its infinitude, Madigan embodied unbridled hope, purity, joy, and wonder in her life and work, deeply enriching our understanding of the self and the world contained within each of us. I am, like so many, forever changed by her vision and friendship. While we have lost a giant too soon, her spirit resides within all of us and her legacy will continue to reveal itself for years to come.”

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 Louise Nevelson, 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 her subjects, seeking to find “the essential truth in the teachings of nature; death and life as a continuum; the temporary nature of the body; and the struggle between human desire and spiritual evolution,” as she put it. For Madigan, her solar photograms evidence the life-giving nature of the sun and the Earth’s eternally changing seasons. Working out of studios in Pennsylvania and Maine, the artist cultivated a sprawling oeuvre that constitutes, as historian, critic, and photographer A. D. Coleman writes, “one of the most coherent and durable considerations of the photogram in the medium’s history.” In addition to her photography career, Madigan was a dedicated teacher who nurtured hundreds of students as a professor at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she eventually chaired the Photography Department and earned the status of Professor Emerita.

Madigan was honored with numerous awards and recognitions during her lifetime. The year 1996 was an especially triumphant one for the artist; she received a Leeway Grant for Excellence in Photography, the Haggerty Art Museum in Milwaukee mounted her first solo museum exhibition, and her first public commission, an installation at the CoreStates Center sports arena in Philadelphia, was completed. Five more public art commissions would follow, including installations at Rittenhouse Square and the Eagles Football Stadium in Philadelphia, as well as projects for the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Her work was the focus of solo exhibitions at the United States Embassy in Windhoek, Namibia (2000), the Villa Poniatowski in Rome (2006) and the Tuska Center for Contemporary Art at the University of Kentucky, Lexington (2008). Madigan’s figural photograms were the subject of three solo exhibitions at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in 1994, 1997, and 2001; accompanying exhibition catalogues were published for the latter two exhibitions. She also received many teaching and residency invitations from around the country and beyond. The artist is represented in numerous museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, California Museum of Photography in Riverside, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Martha Madigan passed peacefully at home in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania on Monday, August 22, 2022, after a fourteen-month-long battle with lung cancer. A memorial for friends and family will be held in September at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.