Jane Alden Stevens

PROFILE

Jane Alden Stevens is a fine art photographer inspired by history at every level — personal, familial, cultural, and global. Her photographic narratives, whether simple or complex, examine and interpret the relationship between humans and the world they create for themselves. Her artistic practice is polymathic in nature, as she studies aspects of psychology, sociology, art, religion, music, economics, agriculture, politics, and geography to inform her work.

Stevens embraces all aspects of traditional and digital photographic technologies, choosing the technique that best suits the visual project at hand. She has created imagery with cameras ranging from a 19th-century Al-Vista panoramic camera to a state-of-the-art DSLR, as well as a Hasselblad medium-format camera and a handmade pinhole camera. Her printing techniques have included cyanotypes, printing on light-sensitive fabric, gelatin silver prints, and digital pigment prints. All prints are produced in Stevens’s studio, with the sole exception of pigment prints measuring larger than 21” on the short side, which are created in a professional fine art printing lab in collaboration with the artist.

Solo exhibitions of Stevens’s work have been mounted at the Dayton Art Institute, ARC Gallery in Chicago, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Stevens has exhibited extensively abroad, including in Finland, Ukraine, Belgium, Germany, and Brazil. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the Cincinnati Art Museum; and the Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo, Brazil; among many others.

Stevens was born in Rochester, NY, and spent many years living and working in Germany. She is Professor Emerita of Fine Arts at the University of Cincinnati and has lived and worked in the Cincinnati, Ohio area for more than 35 years.