Jeffery Deemie

American, born 1956

BiographyDeemie began working with photography in the late 1980s, starting out as a nature photographer who admired the work of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. His first series was of the Great Smoky Mountains and he subsequently made a series of images at Coney Island that resulted in the series The American Beach Scene . The artist spent about ten years making what he describes as “neutral documentary” photographs. As he continued to work, he became more interested in the “human footprint on the landscape as well as nature’s footprint on mankind.” He relocated to the Southwest and continued his beach work with the arrival of Hurricane Ike, creating the series Hurricane Ike – An Imperfect Storm. He continues to work on his present body of work, West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico, from which the proposed images are drawn. In his artist statement for the series, the artist writes: “West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico boast an austere landscape which is dominated by the oil industry and in tension with the natural environment as well as the limited agricultural activities present. This project explores oil’s footprint on the land and highlights our interaction with it while extracting its resources.” The work is presently organized into three portfolios within the overall group: West Texas; Shafter Lake, Texas; and Southeastern New Mexico.
These sere images explore the distinctive landscape of the region and the presence of the oil industry. The artist writes that “these somber oil lands feature unexpected beauty, unlimited vistas, oil patch and infrastructure and evidence of the tenacity of the people who live there.”

Three of his photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike were purchased for the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work is also in the collection of the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, which acquired a group of three works, and the private collection of Clint Willour, director of the Galveston Arts Center and an important donor to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. One of Deemie’s prints was featured in the 2010 and 2013 Houston Center for Photography print auction and exhibition and his work has been shown in juried exhibition in Texas, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. His photographs of Hurricane Ike appeared in the Houston Center for Photography’s Spot magazine and his earlier work (1989-2006) appeared in a variety of publications from Dream Garden Press, Brown Trout, and Cedco Publishing. (Ware 2013)

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