Diane Tuft
Diane Tuft is an American photographer focusing on nature and landscape photography, documenting the effects of the environment on the Earth's landscape. She is based in New York City.
Early life and education
Tuft was born and raised in East Hartford, Connecticut. She graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in mathematics. After graduating, she moved to New York City to work as an actuarial assistant. She later held jobs with the Burroughs Corporation and Computer Design Corporation. During this time, she studied photography at The New School and the International Center of Photography. Tuft married in 1971 and while raising a family studied art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1981 to 1989.Career
''Unseen'' and other work (1998-2011)
Tuft began her work in 1998 with images of snow and ice in Aspen, Colorado. There she first experimented with infrared film, where the photos could capture the infrared light waves that were reflected and refracted on the landscape, which are beyond the human visible spectrum. These photographs would become platinum prints, and resulted in her first solo exhibition, Distillations, at Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York City in 1999. She continued to photograph outside the visible spectrum, focusing on the visual effects of ultraviolet light waves on the Earth's landscape. Tuft began traveling to ozone-depleted areas where larger amounts of ultraviolet light reach the Earth. This led to an interest in climate change and other environmental issues. She began photographing the Arctic landscape in 2001, and has said that an aim of her work is to demonstrate the realities of global warming and its effect on the Earth. She often documents icy landscapes through aerial photography in order to capture "the sculptural qualities of frozen water." She typically zooms in to the landscape to the point of abstraction, framing shots without a sense of scale. In 2008, Tuft published her first monograph, Unseen: Beyond the Visible Spectrum, a retrospective of her photographs between the years 1998 and 2007, featuring the American West, Nepal, North Africa, Iceland and Greenland. The foreword was written by William Fox, director of the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.In 2006, Tuft created a room-size installation, Internal Reflection, which combined sculpture, light, sound and photography. It was exhibited at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York City and at Art LA in Santa Monica, California. Her 2008 series Salt Lake Reconsidered, exhibited at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art in New York City and the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, featured aerial photographs of the Great Salt Lake. Tuft's photographic series Icelandic Glaciers in 2001 and Icelandic Sagas in 2008 document the change of Iceland's glaciers due to climate change. In 2010, Tuft revisited Iceland, creating her series Aftermath, a collection of aerial photographs of the center of Iceland and Eyjafjallajökull's eruption.