Banner of Light: The Lily Dale Photographs
February 4 – 27, 1999
These photographs were made at Lily Dale, a spiritualist community in western New York. Established in 1879, Lily Dale continue to serve as a retreat to study Spiritualism, a religion based on the belief in the ability to communicate with spirits of the dead.
In this work I have used the Lily Dale environment as a foil in creating visual situations which related to my spiritual ambivalence. The result is a series of images which establishes an ambiguous relationship between subject and meaning, prompting the viewer to reflect on his/her connections to the material and spiritual worlds.
Bill McDowell is a photographer living in Plattsburgh, NY.
Bill’s photography book, Ground, with contributions by Wendell Berry and Rosanne Cash, was published by Daylight Books in 2016. Mother Jones Magazine listed Ground in their notable photography books of 2016 and Artnet named it one of the year’s top 10 art books.
McDowell’s monograph, Banner of Light: The Lily Dale Photographs, was published by Light Work in Contact Sheet 96, and his photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Art in America, Art Issues, The New Yorker, Russian Esquire, Guernica, Spot, and Exposure.
Bill is a recipient of a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, and has received the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, the New York Foundation on the Arts Photography Fellowship (twice), as well as artist research grants from the University of Vermont and Texas A&M- Commerce.
Selected solo exhibitions include Jan Kesner Gallery, in Los Angeles, Houston Center of Photography, Robert B. Menschel Gallery at Light Work, Burlington City Arts, The University of Notre Dame, Kenyon College, The Bennington Museum, and St. Lawrence University. His group shows include Harvard Art Museums, Musée d’art de Pully, Switzerland, Whitechapel Gallery, London, U.K., Dallas Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery, Society for Contemporary Photography, in Kansas City, SUNY Plattsburgh Art Museum, and the Triennial of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Museum, Hamburg.
Bill’s photographs and artist books are represented in collections at The Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University, Yale University of Art Gallery, the Harvard Art Museums, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Light Work, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Deichtorhallen Museum, Wellesley College, St. Lawrence University, and Rochester Institute of Technology.