Mark Alice Durant
Portrait by Saskia Kahn
Mark Alice Durant is an artist, writer, and publisher living in Baltimore. He is author of Confessions of a Working Class Artist, Summer of the White Fox, and After, Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera, 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography, Robert Heinecken: A Material History, and co-author of Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal.
His essays have appeared in numerous journals such as Aperture, Art in America, Photograph Magazine, Dear Dave, and many catalogs and monographs, including Rania Matar: She, Marco Breuer: Early Recordings, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, Vik Muniz: Seeing is Believing and McDermott & McGough: A History of Photography. He is editor of the anthologies Running Falling Flying Floating Crawling and Double Feature.
He has served on the faculties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, the University of New Mexico, Syracuse University, and the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. He is professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Durant is publisher / editor of Saint Lucy Books.
Confessions of a Working Class Artist
2026
The realities of socio-economic class in relation to art are rarely addressed, yet those realities undergird the structure, access, and lack of access, to living a creative life in the visual arts. Written in an episodic style, mixing personal anecdotes of shame and revelation, socio-political observations, and stories from fellow working-class artists, Confessions is not a sociological study nor manifesto; It is an attempt to confront how class forms us and continues to inform the career choices (or lack) and the art we make (or don’t make). Illustrated with over 30 images from Frédéric Bazille, Jules Breton, Gustav Caillebotte, Maya Deren, Duccio, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, Alexander Rodchenko, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and the author.
“Mark Alice Durant’s new book, Confessions of a Working Class Artist, illuminates the unseen economic and emotional challenges of leading a creative life outside of privilege. By bridging personal stories with insightful commentary, Durant doesn’t just diagnose the problem; he challenges us to envision a more equitable, human-centered path for our creative community.” — Jim Goldberg
Summer of the White Fox, and After
2024
For six weeks, in the summer of 2019, a mysterious creature appeared every evening in Durant’s Baltimore neighborhood. Was it a biological anomaly, an apparition, a portentous sign, or all the above? The visitation of this ghostly entity prompted a season of reverie; in the dimming twilight, as the vulpine creature darted in and out sight, Durant reconsidered his own life narratives, and questioned his insatiable desire to photographically capture the otherworldly visitor.
In 2020, as the COVID pandemic forced a global redefinition of our notions of personal safety and collective responsibility, Durant faced his own serious health crisis as well as the illness and death of beloved family members. Durant’s episodic account of his hospitalizations and his dwindling ability to understand what was happening to and around him is as vivid as it is harrowing. Grief, fear, tenderness, wonder, dark humor, and the comforts of art and nature are inextricably bound in this photographic and narrative exploration of trauma and mystical transience.
“In Summer of the White Fox, and After, Mark Alice Durant combines photographs and text to produce something remarkable: a deeply personal narrative, addressing the sublime and the harrowing, that pictures and posits what drives, eludes, terrifies and, ultimately, sustains us.” — Marvin Heiferman
Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera
2022
Drama and myth frame the life and death of Maya Deren. Born in Kiev in 1917, at the start of the Russian Revolution, she died forty-four years later in New York City. In her brief life, she established herself as a pioneering experimental filmmaker, prolific writer, accomplished photographer, and crusader for a personal and poetic cinema. Although Deren completed only six short films in her lifetime, her impact on the history of cinema is immeasurable. She has become the patron saint of 20 th century experimental film. The aura that suffuses Deren’s legend emanates from the power of her films, magnified by her bohemian glamour and visionary intelligence. This is the first full biography of Deren. Based on years of research, interviews with some of Deren’s closest collaborators, and generously illustrated with film stills and photographs, author Mark Alice Durant creates a vivid and accessible narrative exploring the complexities and contradictions in the life and work of this remarkable and charismatic artist.
“A vibrant cultural history of one of art’s most exciting era’s, Mark Alice Durant’s Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera is a feast of life and art.” — Lynne Tillman
“A brilliant book. Durant tells the story of the radical and multi-dimensional life of Maya Deren in ways that are as engrossing and inspiring as Deren’s art. Every artist should read this.” — Paul Chan
27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography
2017
A series of link essays that examine how photographs are inextricably bound to our personal and collective histories. Beginning with his childhood obsession with his parents’ wedding album, through a lifetime making photographs, teaching, and writing about photography, Durant’s narrative weaves memoir with photographic history and theory. Illustrated with a broad spectrum of images, from family snapshots to Hubble space imagery, to the work of such artists as Josef Koudelka, Julia Margaret Cameron, Larry Sultan, Nan Goldin, Odilon Redon, and Chris Marker, 27 Contexts describes a life immersed in the quotidian, the political, and the enigmatic aspects of photography.
“Durant’s writing — his storytelling — is often thrilling, wrenching, beautiful.” — George Baker