Amy Stein is a photographer and teacher based in New York City. Her work explores our evolving isolation from community, culture and the environment. Amy crafts photographic allegories set simultaneously in a number of different liminal spaces. Her sure and realistic color works manifest the place where the human-built meets the wild, but in addition they show us where the factual descriptive image meets fiction. Despite their apparent realism, her images are posed and constructed, sometimes using models and taxidermy props, sometimes using the bodies of dead or living animals to re-create, record and perform actual events that occurred in the small Pennsylvania town of Matamoras, which Stein has claimed as surely as Faulkner invented and limned Yoknapatawpha County. What at first appears to be a series of photojournalistic decisive moments is revealed, at a second look, to be a powerfully imagined vision that establishes its strength through its very artificiality.
Stein has been exhibited nationally and internationally and her work is featured in many private and public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Nevada Museum of Art, SMoCA and the West Collection. In 2006, Stein was a winner of the Saatchi Gallery-Guardian Prize for her Domesticated series. In 2007, she was named one of the top fifteen emerging photographers in the world by American Photo magazine and she won the Critical Mass Book Award. A monograph of Domesticated will be published in fall 2008. This forthcoming book won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival. Amy is represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco and Pool Gallery in Berlin.
Read an interview with Amy Stein on FeatureShoot.com