BOOK LAUNCH WITH JANE FULTON ALT
Still Life: A Photographer’s Journey Through Grief and Gardening
Join us at Filter Space for a book launch and signing with artist Jane Fulton Alt, in conjunction with the release of her publication, Still Life: A Photographer’s Journey Through Grief and Gardening.
Still Life: A Photographer’s Journey Through Grief and Gardening by Jane Fulton Alt presents forty-five photographs of a native garden and the flowers and plants that inhabit it. Following the unexpected death of her husband, Howard, Alt assumed responsibility for the nascent ecosystem he had planted in response to his growing concern over climate change. What began as daily stewardship gradually became a source of creative focus and sustenance amid mourning.
Together, the photographs and accompanying texts form a body of work in which personal loss finds expression through close attention to the living world.
Beyond its autobiographical origin, the book operates across several thematic strands. It engages lived experience, the labor of cultivating native plants where people reside, and the broader consequences of climate change. Alt’s contemplative photography provides a shared visual language through which these concerns intersect as parallel yet connected threads. The accompanying essays extend this dialogue, moving between reflections on loss, ecological thought, and the art history of still life. In doing so, they situate the project within a wider cultural and environmental discourse, where an intimate undertaking acquires collective resonance.
About the Artist
Jane Fulton Alt began exploring the visual arts while pursuing a career as a clinical social worker. Her award-winning photography explores the universality of the human condition and the non-material world. Alt received a BA from the University of Michigan and an MA from the University of Chicago. She studied at the Evanston Art Center, as well as at Columbia College and the Art Institute of Chicago. Alt is the author of Look and Leave: Photographs and Stories from New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward (2009) and The Burn (2013). Her portfolio “Crude Awakening” appeared in publications worldwide.
Alt’s work is held in permanent and private collections, including Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sunnhordland Museum, Stord, Norway; Niigata Science Museum, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and New Orleans Museum of Art. Her work is in many special library collections, including Savannah College of Art and Design, UCLA, University of Illinois, University of Vermont, University of Washington, Wesleyan University, and Yale University. She is the recipient of numerous awards and artist residencies.
Alt resides in Evanston, Illinois, and her beloved adopted city, New Orleans.