Tabernacle Niches
2019. Three cast paper niches with digital images. Each progressing toward decay and disintegration.
2019. Three cast paper niches with digital images. Each progressing toward decay and disintegration.
Once digital output was readily available, my experimental image combinations and assemblages became easier to create. These diptychs explore pairings that encourage new ways of seeing.
2015. Greatly enlarged still life details from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Thorne Room Miniatures.
This section continues with my practice of photographing in cemeteries as I explore them, but this time, using digital media.
2010. Head shots from the sculptures in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris.
My photo-diaristic search through international museums and natural history collections in the quest for beauty amidst the macabre.
With the ease of printing colour digitally, more of my work used colour for its inherent verisimilitude and vibrancy. These examples utilize color as the subject as much as the image content itself.
The ease of panoramic views exploded once digital technology became available, and my pano-practice became more extreme and experimental as I explored new ways of working with the long frame.
Further to my interests in all things related to thanatos and vanitas in general, exploring and photographing in cemeteries has been part of my practice from the start.
2003. Photogravures and 3-D views of the limestone alvars of the Northern Peninsula, Newfoundland, and Co. Clare, Ireland.
1991–2005. Photogravures documenting the struggle of trees surviving difficult environments.
The Widelux 35mm film camera I used for this work (ca. 1960s) has a unique 140° field of view to produce long, narrow negatives on 35mm film.
In my search for a photographic image that lives on the surface of the paper, rather than within it like a gelatine-silver print, I've explored multiple photographic processes that include gum prints, cyanotypes, VanDyke prints, and Polaroid transfers.
Early explorations with toners and stain, scratches and additives on heavily transformed gelatine silver negatives and prints.
1988–1990 and 2013. A body of work made exclusively with hand-made pinhole cameras of different formats.
Early black and white print explorations that aim to extend the frame or layer the view. Difficult in a pre-digital age, especially the image-within-an-image on a single support.
1985. MFA Thesis Exhibition of hand-tinted and toned black and white photographs that deal with the many connections between memory, preservation, decay, and mortality.
1981. Black and white medium format work shot over a short period for my final BFA exhibition. The austere and somewhat dark and lonely tone of this collection echoes a period when a family tragedy had recently occurred.
1980. This series of domestic views centered around my home and family utilized a 50mm enlarger lens that barely covered the 4×5 film negative.
Early exploratory photographic work from before and during Art School in the 1970s.
© 2026 David Morrish. Designed by Matthew Hollett.