Jessica Craig-Martin

As an event photographer for publications like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, Jessica Craig-Martin has covered some of the world’s most extravagant parties but she has done well to carve out her own style. 

Craig-Martin’s intentionally framed and obliquely angled photographs work to obscure many of her subject’s faces. In this way, her practice expertly subverts the very genre she occupies; her photographs do not romanticize, in fact they work hard to reveal, not only what the subjects don’t see, but what they probably don’t want shown. As the artifice cracks open, Craig-Martin allows her viewer a unique behind the scenes insight into the glittery imperfections of high society parties.

Amidst the glitz and the glamor, Craig-Martin focuses on sequins, toothy smiles and frown lines to offer a nuanced commentary about society’s obsession with appearance and image. She says, ”The photographs occur in the place between desire and disappointment. Perhaps this highlights a slightly surreal or isolated quality which I do feel when I am in these situations. I often automatically crop out eyes. They tell too much. I am not interested in the identity of individuals or in celebrities or in lampooning anyone. I see the guests as framed within a larger cultural phenomenon, in which I am also complicit as its documentarian. The on-camera flash declares my presence. I am part of the problem.”

Craig-Martin has exhibited her work widely and her work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The New Museum, New York, and The Guggenheim Museum, New York, among other public and private collections.  Craig-Martin lives in New York and works wherever the party is. She is currently working on a book of anecdotes drawn from her adventures in the field and other observations on modern life.