While at The MacDowell Colony in 2002, Neff roamed and photographed the New Hampshire landscape, and gained permission to photograph empty studios, where the collective artistic presence of one hundred years of creativity is particularly strong. While not initially intending to focus on writers, she returned to Philadelphia and found that five photographs suggested a sensibility that she associated with writers — Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, Henry David Thoreau. The photograph included here, Dickinson, is a layered composition of a framed landscape awkwardly hung on a beige colored wall. To the left, the sliver of a window hints at a view of an actual landscape. This transient image is not intended to describe a specific poem, but Neff felt that the stark qualities reminded her of the poet and the particular life she led. The shift between inside and outside is characteristic of Neff’s photographs.

This photograph was included in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, Eileen Neff’s 2004 solo exhibition and catalogue at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia PA, which featured a series of photographs created during her residency at The McDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH. Her work has been included in group exhibitions Out of the Woods, Julie Saul Gallery; H20, Danese Gallery in New York; and The Sea and the Sky, The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland. She has been an artist in residence at two Philadelphia institutions, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, and the Rosenbach Museum and Library where she created a site-specific installation in the Marianne Moore room. Neff has received fellowships from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, and the Leeway Foundation. From 1989 to 2002, she was an art critic and writer for ArtForum magazine. She received her BFA from Philadelphia College of Art, and her MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. More information can be found at www.locksgallery.com.