Barbara Elliott

 

Elliot began making photographs in 2001 when she came across information about a Polaroid image transfer class being offered at the Santa Rosa Junior College. She saw it as an opportunity to indulge a life-long interest in photography that she had had no chance to explore before. She never looked back.

 

Since then Elliott has done straight photography in both the traditional and digital modes. More recently she has been learning alternative processes including cyanotype, Van Dyke printing, and the platinum/palladium process—in addition to Polaroid transfers. Polaroid transfers involve making images using instant film and transferring the image to a paper backing while the image is still developing.  

 

Elliott’s work captures a somewhat macabre humor but always with an understated elegance. Her subject is always the human form--whether alive or inanimate. She photographs old dolls weathered by time, mannequins missing limbs, or live female models wrapped in spiraling cellophane. When she photographs dolls they seem to come alive. When she photographs living beings, they seem to become suspended in time. Her art is contemporary but nostalgic, as if covered with a thin layer of attic dust. Her art is haunting. Elliott lives and works in Santa Rosa, California. Her work has been shown and is housed in private collections throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.