Ann Rhoney

A native of Niagara Falls and a graduate of Cornell University, Ann Rhoney (b. 1953) approaches her work as a photographer with a painter’s sensitivity to color and light. She applies oil paints by hand to her gelatin-silver prints, allowing each piece to transcend the two-dimensional picture plane. The Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote of her photograph Silk Dress Coming (1987), which was featured in its landmark exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (2012-13), "Frustrated by the distortions and expressive limitations of commercially produced color film, Rhoney uses oil paint to color her black-and-white photographs in a naturalistic style that allows for great chromatic subtlety yet fastidiously conceals its own artifice."

Rhoney’s work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; the American Scandinavian Foundation, New York, NY; the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY; the Burchfield Penney Art Center, SUNY Buffalo State, Buffalo, NY; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin; the Collection of Nion McEvoy; the Paul Sack Photographic Trust, San Francisco, CA; and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France, among other public and private institutions.

In addition to exhibiting her work widely in art galleries and museums across the United States, Rhoney has seen her work featured in campaigns for companies including Apple and the United Colors of Benneton; on the covers of The New York Magazine, Newsweek, Fortune, Life, and Tibor Kalman’s Colors, among other publications; and in articles in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Vogue.