Elliot Ross is an American photographic artist whose career runs from the experimental, process-driven work of the early 1970s to the carefully composed black-and-white portraiture that brought him international attention in the twenty-first century. Born in Chicago in 1947 and based for most of his working life in San Francisco, he has moved between conceptual photography, literary and historical projects, and studies of the natural world, publishing books in the United States and Europe and placing his prints in museum collections on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ross is best known today for his photographs of animals, but that body of work is only one chapter in a longer story. Before it came years of experimenting with the materials of photography itself, a touring series inspired by a nineteenth-century French poet, and an eight-year project on Jewish women and the Holocaust that was exhibited across Central Europe. This article follows the artist behind those projects and the path his career has taken.
Chicago Roots and Art School in San Francisco
Ross was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1947. He went west for his training, enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute, a school with a long tradition in photography. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts there and went on to complete a Master of Fine Arts at the same institution in 1971.
The Bay Area remained his base after graduation, and the city has stayed woven into his work ever since. His alma mater later included him in San Francisco Art Institute: Fifty Years of Photography, a survey of its photographers mounted at the Transamerica Pyramid in 2000, and decades after art school the view from his own San Francisco apartment became the starting point for one of his most personal series.
Experiments With the Medium
Ross’s earliest exhibited work was conceptual and process-oriented, more interested in how a photograph is made and perceived than in conventional picture-making. That approach caught the eye of Van Deren Coke, the influential curator and historian who led the photography programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the University of New Mexico’s art museum. Coke chose Ross for Light and Substance, an exhibition that opened at the University Art Museum in Albuquerque in 1973 and traveled in 1974 to Claremont College, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York.
In the exhibition catalogue, Joseph Deal discussed one of Ross’s contributions: a large color panel assembled from photographs of flowers that had been deliberately blurred by moving the camera during the exposure. The prints were arranged at random and placed behind uneven, crinkled plastic, so that the movement in one image seemed to interrupt or cancel the movement in the next. Deal wrote that the piece kept the viewer out of the garden it pictured, producing a “chaotic, impenetrable surface”, while each small photograph still held on to its identity as a record of a specific time and place.
More institutional exhibitions followed. In 1976 Ross’s work appeared in Photo/Synthesis at Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and in The Eyes Have It: Photographic Images at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He was part of the twentieth-anniversary exhibition at San Francisco’s Ruth Braunstein Gallery in 1981. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art included him in Extending the Perimeters of Twentieth Century Photography in 1985 and, a year later, in Cross Currents II, a display of recent additions to its collection. He also took part in The Concealed Camera at the Eye Gallery in San Francisco in 1988 and in Six Photographers at the Hung Chong Gallery in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1991.
Spleen (after Baudelaire)
Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Ross developed Spleen (after Baudelaire), a series that borrowed its title and mood from Charles Baudelaire, the French poet whose prose poems on melancholy and modern city life were published as Paris Spleen. A book from the project appeared in 1984, and the work later toured as a solo exhibition through a run of American university and art center galleries.
Between 1991 and 1994 the series was shown at the Feldheym Library Galleries in San Bernardino, California; the WorkSpace Art Gallery at the University of Colorado, Boulder; the gallery of the Department of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale; The Light Factory Center for Photographic Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina; the photography gallery of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana; and the Fine Arts Gallery at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. It was also presented at Side Street Projects in Santa Monica. Vanderbilt’s gallery would include Ross again in later years, in Artists’ Books from Nashville Collections in 2003 and Difficult Art and the Liberal Arts Imagination in 2013.
In 1994 he also took part in Forecast: Shifts in Direction at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe and The Post-Industrial Landscape at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery. At the turn of the millennium he contributed to Neural Notations, shown at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery and the Sesnon Gallery at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2000, and at The Physics Room in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2001. In 2001 his work was also part of Face to Face: Contemporary Portraits at California State University, Chico.
Yehudhith: Women and the Holocaust
The project that defined Ross’s work in the early 2000s began with a few seconds of film. While watching grainy footage from the Holocaust era, he noticed a teenage girl standing by the doors of a railway boxcar and later recalled thinking that she looked like his own sister. That moment set off a project that, by his own account, took more than eight years to complete.
Ross photographed a series of Jewish women in his studio, many of whom were not professional models, often spending hours with each sitter to arrive at one or two frames he could use. He then set the portraits beside writings about the Holocaust, building a layered narrative that opens with Adolf Hitler’s remarks about assimilated Jewish women and closes with a refrain by the poet Paul Celan. His goal, he explained, was to link present-day experience with that history on an emotional level, using the faces of ordinary contemporary women to make the past feel immediate.
The book, Yehudhith: Photographs by Elliot Ross with Texts About Women and the Holocaust, was published by Hawkhaven Press in San Francisco in 2004, with proceeds going to the Charlotte Salomon Fund for Jewish Artists at the city’s Contemporary Jewish Museum. Reviewing it in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jonathan Curiel called the black-and-white photographs “evocative and mesmerizing” and reported that readers had found in the book “a unique take on the horrors of the Holocaust”.
The photographs were first exhibited at the Jewish Museum San Francisco in 2004 and then traveled to Central Europe. In 2005 they were shown at the Muzeum SNP in Banská Bystrica and the House of Photography in Poprad, both in Slovakia, and at the Prague House of Photography in the Czech Republic, where the exhibition drew extensive coverage in the Czech press, from Radio Prague to Respekt and iDNES. The work returned to Banská Bystrica in 2007 at the Stredoslovenská galéria and was shown again in San Francisco at The Arts at CIIS in 2011.
Copies of Yehudhith are held in the libraries of institutions closely linked to its subject and to photography, among them the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the International Center of Photography, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Jewish themes continued to appear in Ross’s work after the book. He took part in Scents of Purpose at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in 2005, and in 2009 he was among the artists in the museum’s New Works/Old Story.
A Turn Toward Animals
From around 2007, Ross turned his camera toward animals, starting the portrait series that would bring him his widest audience. The work was published by Schilt Publishing in Amsterdam as Animal in 2010 and Other Animals in 2014, followed by Crows Ascending in 2024. It also led to Elliot Ross: Seeing Animals, a solo exhibition at the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium, in 2024, and his inclusion in the exhibition Animality: 100 Years of Photographs at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in 2026. Schilt Publishing Gallery in Amsterdam represents his work, and Workroom Gallery in San Francisco has hosted several of his recent solo shows, including Elliot Ross: Selected Work 2007 to 2020.
Working Alongside Writers
Ross’s photographs have appeared alongside the work of writers. Spleen (after Baudelaire) saw his work combined with his translations of some of Baudelaire’s poems. The British literary magazine Granta has also set his pictures beside fiction. Its Autumn 2017 issue ran one of his animal portraits with “Lagomorph”, a story by Alexander MacLeod, and the Winter 2018 issue, Animalia, carried a portfolio of his Animal Studies introduced by MacLeod.
In 2021 he provided the photographs for On Cats: An Anthology, published in the United Kingdom by Notting Hill Editions, a house known for its essay collections. The book features writings by Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, Edward Gorey, Muriel Spark, Nikola Tesla, John Keats, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Caitlin Moran, and is introduced by Margaret Atwood, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale.
In Museum Collections
Over five decades, Ross’s prints have entered a wide range of public collections. In the United States they are held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which also houses the archives of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Richard Avedon; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Oakland Museum of California; the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento; the University of New Mexico Art Museum; the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College; and the Berkeley Art Museum and the Magnes Collection at the University of California, Berkeley.
In Europe his work belongs to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Musée de la Photographie Charleroi in Belgium and the Groote Museum at Artis in Amsterdam. His books are found in the libraries of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the rare books collection of the University of Colorado Boulder.
Personal Life
Ross lives and works in San Francisco, the city where he trained and where most of his career has taken shape. He is married to Ellen Ullman, the author of Close to the Machine and Life in Code.
Across his varied projects, one habit has stayed constant: a preference for the single, carefully isolated subject. Whether it is a woman’s face set beside Holocaust testimony or a lone animal against a black ground, Ross asks the viewer to slow down and look closely at one presence at a time.
