Eileen Quinlan (born 1972 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a self-described still-life photographer who shoots with medium format and large format cameras. An art critic for Art in America likened her style to that of Moholy-Nagy and James Welling. Early life and education Quinlan received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1996 from the School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her Master of Fine Arts in 2005 from Columbia University. Eileen did street photography, portrait photography, and landscape photography before getting into the photographic style she is in now. After graduating she learned that she no longer wanted to take pictures out in the world but wanted to construct photography in the studio. Still, she was unsure of what the subject would be. A lot of her early smoke studies she considered tests, but it did pave a path for her current style of photography. Work Quinlan is often regarded as one of many contemporary artists revisiting late Modernism, alongside Tomma Abts, Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Sergei Jensen, and her husband Cheyney Thompson. Also she is considered one of several contemporary photographers — among them Michele Abeles, Liz Deschenes and Sara VanDerBeek — who are extending the innovations of the earlier Pictures Generation into new territory. Quinlan uses medium and large format analog cameras to create abstract photographs, and then agitates the film via steel wool or long chemical processing. Some of her photographic subjects are smoke, mirrors, mylar, colored lights, and other photographs. The result is photographic images that are reminiscent of color field painting and op art thus furthering the contemporary conversation between photography and painting. Her political leanings, boundary pushing processes and resulting images are part of why Quilan has gained notoriety in exhibitions such as ""What is a Photograph?"" curated by Carol Squiers in 2014 at the International Center for Photography in New York City, New York and ""Outside the Lines: Rites of Spring"" curated by Dean Daderko in 2014 at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas. Eileen Quinlan spoke at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston discussing her exhibit, Momentum 13: Eileen Quinlan. Most of the time she spends doing photography is in the studio arranging objects. Eileen Quinlan was experimenting with objects coming into the picture and adding gels for color. She was rather interested in the construction of the photograph from the ground up.