Marion Belanger

Marion Belanger has continued to study the Florida landscape since her 2002 ACA residency. She writes: “I read the Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean and then the Watson Trilogy by Peter Matthiessen. One book led to another, and I began to imagine the visceral feel of the place, the humid touch of the air, the oppressive heat. I had seen the Everglades from the plane – a dark nothingness at night, and by day a flat, often wet expanse of swampland, punctuated by agricultural fields and new housing developments. I was curious to experience the natural landscape, of course, but I was even more interested in the determined efforts of engineers, over many years, to eliminate the swamp – to drain it for sugarcane fields and development profit. This is the Everglades I photographed. To me it was the dark heart of the state.“ In 2007, she was Photographer Laureate of Tampa. Her book of photographs Everglades: Outside and Within was published in 2009. She holds an MFA from Yale and lives in Connecticut.

Barbara Bosworth

Noted photographer and naturalist, Barbara Bosworth is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, best known for her intensively researched projects on trees, birds, and the night sky. She is widely published and exhibited, most notably for Trees: National Champions and Natural Histories. She holds an MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology. Her Florida work, titled Elsewhere, considers sea and sky at the moment day turns to night.

Torben Eskerod

Torben Eskerod is recognized as one of Denmark’s most important and innovative portrait artists but his longstanding interest in landscape is less well known. Coming to the ACA as a Master Artist led him to explore Florida’s back roads in a series of lush, wet, and disorienting images called Mapping. Eskerod is an independent practitioner who has studied at Aarhus School of Architecture and Fatamorgana School of Photography. He lives in Copenhagen.

Susan E. Evans

Susan E. Evans is known for a wide-range of experimental and conceptual photographic work including the two series she completed in Florida: Landscape Assessment and Landscaping. She was educated at Goddard College and Cornell, from which she received the MFA. She is a professor of art at Oakland University in Michigan where she lives.

Elaine Ling

Elaine Ling, a Master Artist during the ACA residency, was born in Hong Kong, but has lived in Toronto since the age of nine. She is best known for her minimalist depictions of such far-flung destinations as Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, Burma, and Bhutan and her use of an 8 x 10 view camera in challenging environments. Like the work made in those places, Ling’s Florida work considers the relationships of humans with the natural environments they inhabit.

Sam Sweezy

Sam Sweezy’s notable career as a photographer of architecture has been characterized by collaborations with art historians, anthropologists, and urban planners resulting in important bodies of work from Armenia, Panama, and Vietnam. His work in Florida concentrates on the built landscape and its commercial implications. Sweezy studied film at Boston University and lives in Massachusetts.

Jim Vecchi

A dual US/ Italian citizen, Jim Vecchi has lived and worked extensively in California and Tuscany. He holds an MFA from Stanford University. His Florida work concentrated on the formal and imaginative aspects of humans at the water’s edge. He writes: "The First Contact residency in 2002 was my first opportunity to engage with Florida, my first opportunity to see, feel, smell, hear, and taste it. I was very struck by its complexity and by its ability to contain extreme opposites. Florida is beautiful/garish, lush/barren, modern/old, welcoming/off-putting, righteous/immoral, luxurious/destitute. Florida is a plural not a singular noun."