Artwork description / Biography
Last Light
I’ve always had a thing for bars. The more marginal the better. I’m mostly drawn to rural or urban outliers- raw, dilapidated joints that evoke an earlier, grittier era. Humble, solitary structures shrouded in loneliness and isolation, yet miraculously, as if blessed by some divine patron, still open. An authentic down-to-its-rotting-bones refuge where a hard-edged world is numbed and softened by alcohol and dim lighting.
Defiant vestiges of the past, the bar always seems the last to go. After the grocery store, the lumberyard and the barbershop long ago surrendered to the future and shut their doors for the final time, the bar stayed on. Slumped alone on the edge of a discarded town, its neon spills out onto the asphalt and burns through the night.
Inside, the beer is cold, and the jukebox stocked with George Jones and dirges from an irretrievable past.
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Originally from Lubbock, Texas, Teri has been photographing fragments of American culture as a way of connecting with the world around her for the past twenty-five years. After studying photojournalism at the University of Texas and serving as an intern at the Magnum photo agency in New York, Teri developed her printmaking skills in darkrooms improvised in kitchens and motel rooms across the country.
In 2012, after years of being primarily a “daylight” photographer, Teri started experimenting with night photography. Using moonlight or available streetlight she began a series of social landscapes that reveal a lonely, yet enduring portrait of a nearly forgotten America.
Teri currently lives in rural Colorado with her husband Mike. When not lost in the backcountry, or in her darkroom producing palladium prints, she can be found in her beloved ’88 Ford Van on the track of the perfect roadside bar. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and published in The Huffington Post, The London Sunday Times, The Sun Magazine, Photo District News and on the NPR website. Teri is immensely grateful for the funding she has received through the Puffin Foundation and Dave Bown Projects.
