Melissa Ann Pinney

Melissa Ann Pinney’s closely-observed studies of the social lives and emerging identities of American women have won the photographer numerous fellowships and awards, and found their way into the collections of the major museums in the US and abroad. Pinney’s work first garnered attention when it was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s major 1991 exhibition, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. Her evocative photographs of the stages of life of American women earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999, which resulted in her first major monograph, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls (2003). Melissa Ann Pinney’s next book, Girl Ascending, (2010) focused on a touchstone moment in the lives of American girls. Pinney’s latest book, TWO, includes 80 photographs and short essays by ten distinguished authors on the nature of two. Ann Patchett edited the book and wrote the introduction.