DIANNE BLELL
FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY

[PLACEHOLDER] Dianne Blell is a photographer working in Bridgehampton, NY and New York City. She started shooting large format 4x5 film in the 1970’s. In her most well-known and exhibited work, she built and hand-painted huge sets, often in her NYC studio. When she was in the field, she shot on 35mm — such as her wildlife work in Africa.  In the late 1980s, Dianne began her Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography series using early digital scanning and software, which was written about not just art publications (e.g., Interview Magazine), but also software and tech magazines of the era. Her work is best described as an early pre-cursor to Photoshop, involving the layering of individual photo scans in a rudimentary software editing program. Once Photoshop was invented, she transitioned to this software in her last series completed in the 1990’s. This work took her nearly a decade to complete after her entire loft and its contents were destroyed in 9/11. Her photos of the aftermath of this tragedy (her studio is based at Ground Zero, and she photographed the recovery efforts through her windows) are now in the collection of the 9/11 Memorial Museum.