Jeffrey Silverthorne
author · photographer
Jeffrey Silverthorne (1946–2022) was an American photographer and educator, born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He earned a BFA (1969), an MAT (1970) and an MFA (1977) from the Rhode Island School of Design, and later taught at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. He is best known for photographing physical and psychological borders, including death and nudity. His subjects included corpses at the Rhode Island state morgue in the 1970s, the transvestite community of New York, and the brothels of Boystown on the Mexican-American border. He also made staged work, portraits and motel-room pictures. He received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1986. Retrospectives were held at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce (2014), FoMu in Antwerp (2015) and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (2016). His work is held by MoMA, LACMA, Yale University Art Gallery and George Eastman House, among others. He died in June 2022 after a long illness.[1,2,3]
- death
- morgue
- nudity
- sexuality
- aging
- brothels
- borders
- portraiture
Works by Jeffrey Silverthorne
- 2007 Directions for Leaving: Photographs 1971-2006 Retrospective catalogue with texts by Annie Proulx, Cary Loren and Robert Frank
- 2009 Boystown, The Perfume of Desire
- 2010 Traverses
- 2015 Jeffrey Silverthorne (Working)
- 2017 Morgue
Exhibitions
- 2007 Directions for Leaving
Awards
- 1986 National Endowment for the Arts Grant
- 1992 Art Matters Inc. Grant
- 1993 Best of Show, 18th Biennial