Willie Anne Wright Biography

Willie Anne Wright is a native and resident of Richmond, Virginia. Willie Anne Wright, has been working since the seventies, largely in lensless pinhole and photogram photography, and a recent return to these earlier processes within photography at large has brought attention to this incredible body of work. Accompanied by a new book from Candela Press (April 2016), Direct Positive explores Willie Anne Wright’s innovative use of Cibachrome color material and her production of unique direct positive images. Strangely saturated color, visual distortion and vibrant ideas gave rise to these beautiful and insistent objects. Willie Anne Wright received a BS in Psychology from The College of William and Mary and an MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. She also studied photography at Maine Photographic Workshops, Rockport, Maine; Visual Studies Workshops, Rochester, New York; and VCU. Willie Anne Wright’s paintings, serigraphs and drawings were her professional focus until 1972 when pinhole photography became her primary creative medium. Since then her lensless photography - pinhole and photogram - have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and have been included among numerous publications such as Art News, The Oxford American, Le Stenope, and The Book of Alternative Processes. Willie Anne Wright’s works are collected privately and publicly, and are in the permanent collections of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta Georgia; The Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia; and the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana, among others.