(Born September 8, 1949)
Martin Stupich was trained in painting and sculpture in Milwaukee at the Layton School of Art. In the early ‘70s he studied photography with Emmet Gowin in Ohio. Then, after 2 years as a steel worker back in Milwaukee, he moved to Atlanta to earn a master’s degree in photography from Georgia State University as a student of John McWilliams.
He stepped from graduate school into a career photographing industrial landscape with early grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, documentation projects for the HABS HAER HALS collections at the Library of Congress, then as a photographer recording sites from Panama to Puget Sound for the Army Corps of Engineers.
In 2011 he began a relationship with the Smithsonian Institution, which commissioned him to document its revered museum buildings, the Washington Monument Grounds and historic National Mall.
His ASARCO project (ORE and EMPIRE) in 2021 enters its final phase, photographing the historic industrial landscape along the El Paso/Rio Grande borderlands–and south to Mexico City and north to Leadville in the Colorado Rockies.
Throughout Stupich’s career the line between commerce and art has been wiggly and blurred. His photographs of western dams and NASA Launch pads might hang in Tokyo galleries, while his industrial portfolios reside happily in official State Historic Preservation archives folded into dense historical reports.
His projects from Cape Canaveral to Kurdistan reaffirm his belief that all landscape is cultural, and that good photographs made there can contribute to the useful literature of this place and time.