Maureen Ruddy Burkhart is a photographer based in Longmont, CO. She received her BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied under Pirkle Jones, Jack Fulton and Henry Wessel. 

Maureen’s work has been shown in Boulder, New York, Paris, London, Berlin, China, Denver, The Center for Photographic Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography…and outer space with The British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Humanity in Space 2020.

She has been featured in Black and White Magazine, The Guardian, Slate, All-About-Photo Magazine, SxSE Magazine, Edge of Humanity, & Feature Shoot.

Her work is in collections in The International Museum of Dance, The MIT Libraries/Collections on Islamic Architecture, The Boulder County Human Services, CO, and Art Photo Index.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Till Death

Maureen Ruddy Burkhart’s photography covers a lot of ground, both literally and figuratively. From intimate portraits of people living in Nairobi’s Kibera neighborhood to her observations of suburban development and the natural world, and, more recently, her experiments with alternative photographic processes, her work reflects a curiosity about the world around her and a willingness to explore different ways of interpreting it.

What I find particularly interesting is how often beauty becomes the entry point into something less comfortable. In My Suburbia, seemingly idyllic landscapes raise questions about what has been displaced to create them. In Allegories of Melancholy, the natural world takes on a darker, more contemplative quality. And in Aerosol Suspensions, clouds, fog, and smoke become both objects of beauty and potential warnings about the environment. Printed on translucent vellum and embellished with 24-karat gold leaf, these images are as much about the materials as about what the camera captured.

Across these very different bodies of work, Maureen asks us to consider not only what we’re looking at, but what might lie beneath the surface. Whether she’s photographing people, places, or the atmosphere itself, there’s often more going on than what first meets the eye.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Till Death

DNJ: Tell us about your childhood.

MRB: My father, born and raised in the coal-mining country of northeast England, left shortly after WWII ended and moved to Hawaii to set up a radar station, where he met my mother. My mother had been an orphan, putting herself through school and then later joining the army. Her dream was to teach kindergarten in Hawaii, which she did, and she has spoken fondly about those years throughout my life.

I was born in Philadelphia, the second of five children. When I was 9 months old, we took a ship across the Atlantic to France, where I went to preschool with my older brother. We then moved to Rabat, Morocco, just in time for the revolution there.  We eventually returned to the US for a few years, and then around 1969 our family moved to Tehran, where I attended an international school. Those were some of the best of times, and I still have lifelong friends that were made there.

As a child, my curiosity almost always got the best of me. I was also a budding feminist (my mother’s words). I supposedly never crawled; instead, I went right to running—right out the door. That story was told over and over. I’m a wanderer, I’ll admit. I loved painting—horses, models, and dogs—and each one had a story. I wrote a story about a missing penny that traveled the world and the seas, passing from animal to whale. When my father was in his 80s, he gave that story back to me. I’ve always had a sense of adventure. I wanted to go everywhere…but I still loved having a home and decorating it with art and memorabilia from all over.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Allegories of Melancholy

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Kibera: A Slice of Heaven

DNJ: What brought you to photography?

MRB: During high school in Tehran, a political scandal led my family to send me to an English boarding school for my senior year. As a consolation gift, my father gave me a Pentax Spotmatic 500. I loaded it up with Tri-X film and began photographing my loneliness and angst (but, to be fair, I was a teenager). My roommates and I found an abandoned house in the woods and staged fanciful scenes of ourselves there, which I found quite therapeutic.  The following year I studied in Germany where I photographed other students and created a yearbook. By then, I had been bitten by the photography bug and headed to the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI).

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Kibera: A Slice of Heaven

At SFAI, I studied under Pickle Jones, a master darkroom printer, and learned to love the print. He also did a documentary on the Black Panther Movement, which became a book that colored how I see the world. I thought that he personalized the Panthers and their families—and yet, they were vilified in the press. This was an important realization for me about images vs. reality. I knew that I had to be true to my subjects and also to myself.

As for my subject matter, I mostly photographed my experiences there, which were honestly not very uplifting. Coming back to the “States” had been a rude awakening. Soon after I arrived in San Francisco, Patty Hearst was kidnapped, and it took over the news. There was a SWAT team that swept into my neighborhood; apparently they had been living there! There was a lot of discontent in the queer community; AIDS was taking people I knew (before we knew what the disease was); drug culture was everywhere; Nixon was impeached; the Vietnam War was finally over. So much was happening, and I just felt out of place. Little did I know I would spend the next 50 years trying to figure it out. And THAT is the magic of photography—my camera was my therapist.

DNJ: Your current work seems quite different from your earlier, more documentary work. It might even share a certain style with your iPhone work, but it still feels different. How did you get from there to here?

MRB: As you mentioned, I used my iPhone for years to create nature scenes that became the First Day series. These were single images, composites of the same scene taken at different times of day. Something like a moving film turned into a single image. The iPhone empowered me because I realized that I could make the world a place with two moons or two suns; I didn’t need to be literal. That is when I broke free from photography conventions and began to dig deeper into my creative mind.

Since COVID, I’ve moved away from people-oriented projects to nature-focused ones. It may also have been because of my age—the kids were grown and had their own lives; I wasn’t involved in groups or anything like that. But nature has always been a source of solace for me, and during lockdown I walked for miles and miles, noticing my surroundings (like any good photographer would). I swear I could hear the plants growing and the birds singing/sighing in relief. This was actually the beginning of my bird journey.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Allegories of Melancholy

I still remember the day an unidentified wheeled cart carrying liquid insecticide rolled through the open space, spraying that foul-smelling substance. From then on, the birds had disappeared, as I walked around in horror. That was an aha moment for me and marked the beginning of my quest to honor the birds somehow.

This is where the documentary aspect comes into play. I saw the birds as inseparable from their environment. I began photographing great blue herons as far north as Wyoming, and they all shared the same challenges—development and habitat loss—which became the series Allegories of Melancholy. Then, on a trip to England, I saw prints by the illustrator John Duncan of the now-extinct Great Auk and was inspired to elevate birds’ fragility by using gilding to honor the subject.

Now remember the Kibera statement where I couldn’t see the negative? I believe that if we can imagine the best, then we are more likely to have it. So if I can photograph and present the incredible beauty of nature in a particular style, that will inspire the rest of us to protect it. Many worthy image makers document the downside, which cannot be discounted. But my vision is to inspire.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Kibera: A Slice of Heaven

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Kibera: A Slice of Heaven

DNJ: When you’re choosing images for Aerosol Suspensions, what makes one belong and another not? Is it primarily what is actually happening in the atmosphere, what the image looks like, or something else?

MRB: For at least 16 years, I’ve been collecting images of smoke or vapors, clouds, and fog. I honestly don’t know why I did this, but I found it very visually compelling. This is the beauty of photographic art—you take/create images based on your interest, and then later you realize why you liked it. I think of my work in terms of the yin and the yang—a quest for beauty and wonder against a mood that might be described as melancholic or mysterious. So in that sense, Aerosol Suspensions is the epitome of that dichotomy.

When choosing specific images for this series, I try to channel my unconscious “damn, I’m moody today” and my conscious “this fits all my technical and creative criteria.”  Many images fit the criteria of aerosol suspensions, but I need to balance those examples with visual interest and the right amount of moodiness, if that makes sense.

But I think above all, I want the image to invite the viewer to linger a moment longer and wonder. Some suspensions invite more questions and fewer answers, like smoke and vapors. Other suspensions perhaps give relief or wonder. So, when the series is seen as a whole, it balances these effects.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Aerosol Suspensions

DNJ: The vellum-and-gold process changes the photographs so much. How did you begin using this process? What did it let you say that a conventional photographic print couldn’t?

MRB: I’d wanted to learn the gilding process since COVID—all our lives were slowing down, and I thought it would be a helpful, meditative process. I took an online class and then refined certain aspects to make it more polished. For example, I learned that low tack tape is far superior to regular artist tape when working with vellum.

As with my gilded bird prints, I wanted to elevate the environment to a place of fragility, since that’s truly where the planet is. In the beginning of this series, I printed in black and white and gilded with silver, which seemed logical. But it was surprisingly flat and uninteresting. So I tried the gold, and it was instant love. It seemed like the perfect yin/yang—a landscape with an underlying melancholic tone. It fit well with my personal vision.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Aerosol Suspensions

DNJ: In general, with your work, do you want the viewer to know immediately what they’re looking at, or is that moment of uncertainty important to you?

MRB: I find this question quite interesting. I like the work to seem obvious at first, but I also want it to linger with the viewer. As with my documentary work, something is usually going on in the details that you find and appreciate on a second look. Also, melancholy holds wonder and mystery—or uncertainty, as you put it.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Aerosol Suspensions

DNJ: The gold is beautiful—really beautiful—and the subjects themselves can be, too, even when what we’re looking at may be smoke, pollution, fire, or other evidence of environmental damage. How do you think about beauty in this work?

MRB: Since not all atmospheric vapors are bad or poisonous (like clouds), there’s uncertainty, as you mentioned. The landscape has inherent beauty that draws the eye in. Then there’s the internal conversation. The materiality is important in bringing these two paradigms together. The gold-toned black-and-white pieces look eerily dark and mysterious, yet compellingly seductive. In addition, if I choose the right image, I’ve potentially created that longed-for conversation between subject and viewer.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Aerosol Suspensions

DNJ: Has working with the photograph physically changed the way you photograph in the first place? Are you now looking through the camera thinking about what might happen with the print?

MRB: My first instinct is to photograph whatever appeals to me, but I won’t even bother if the lighting is bad, for example. Then, as I view the images on my screen, I decide where I can use them. Usually, I can tell at capture if it will work as a gilded print, but sometimes, as we all know, hope isn’t enough. My final prints involve a lot of experimentation. I begin with cost-effective imitation gold, then, if I feel it will work, I move on to real gold. I sometimes work with silver, but it tarnishes, so the image has to work with that time-induced effect. And sometimes I work with white gold, or 12k gold, if I want a silvery color cast.

So to answer your question, I do think about the outcome at capture, but I almost always have to experiment. That’s the fun part for me.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Aerosol Suspensions

DNJ: Your environmental concerns appear in other work as well, including My Suburbia. When did that become something you consciously wanted the work to address?

MRB: Being in Colorado is like living in a constant construction zone. I’ve lived here since 1990 (except for one year in Mexico), and I sometimes have trouble finding my way around because of all the change. At the beginning of this construction rush, housing developments sprang up everywhere—which is why I started this series. So, yes, I’ve been keenly aware of environmental concerns since then, but now I feel it is incumbent upon me to do my part.

©Maureen Ruddy Burkhart; from Allegories of Melancholy