Scott McMahon

Scott McMahon is Curator of Photography at the Lilly Library. His primary areas of research involve historic/antiquarian processes and the production of his own photographic works using wet plate collodion, gum bichromate, anthotype, and cyanotype, as well as camera obscuras and homemade pinhole cameras.

Scott’s images have been published in The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James, Pinhole Photography, Rediscovering a Historic Technique by Eric Renner, Anthotype by Malin Fabbri, Poetics of Light – Contemporary Pinhole Photography by Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer, and Gum Printing – A Step-by-Step Manual by Christina Z. Anderson among others.

Selected exhibitions include Poetics of Light, Palace of the Governors New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe, NM & National Media Museum, Bradford, UK; Amerykańskie Metafory, Galeria Pusta, Katowice, Poland & Old Gallery ZPAF, Warsaw, Poland; Forgotten Attributes, Three Columns Gallery, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Cellulose Documents: Forget Me Not (in collaboration with Katina Bitsicas) New Orleans Film Festival, New Orleans, LA; Second Nature, The Halide Project, Philadelphia, PA; and Response Time (with Ahmed Salvador), Sol Mednick Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. He was a resident artist at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine; iPark Artists’ Enclave in East Haddam, CT; Border Art Residency in La Union, New Mexico; and Main Street Arts in Clifton Springs, NY.

Prior to joining the Lilly Library team, Scott was Professor of Art at Columbia College (Columbia, MO) where he taught darkroom and digital photography and courses in the history of photography. He was also Director of the Sidney Larson Gallery (Columbia College) where he curated exhibitions such as Being Close and Staying Longer: Photographs by Bruce Davidson and Alchemical Ensemble: New Visions in Historic Photographic Processes, as well as being the steward of their permanent collection.  

Scott received his M.F.A. in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston, MA and his B.F.A. in Photography from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA. A selection of his work can be found at  scottmcmahonphoto.com.