Liz Deschenes (born 1966) is an American contemporary artist and educator. Her work is situated between sculpture and image and engages with post-conceptual photography and Minimalism. Her work examines the fluidity of the medium of photography and expands on what constitutes the viewing of a photograph. Deschenes has stated that she seeks to "enable the viewer to see the inconstancy of the conditions of display, which are always at play but sometimes hard to see." Her practice is not bound to a single technology, method, process, or subject, but to the fundamental elements of photography, such as light, paper, chemistry, and time. She has taught at Bennington College and was a visiting artist at Columbia University's School of Visual Arts and Yale University. In 2019, she was the Wolf Chair in Photography at Cooper Union. She currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She lives and works in New York City. Early life and education Deschenes was born in 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up on the South Shore, a largely homogeneous and conservative town. As a child, she frequently encountered and was fascinated by the Boston Gas Tank (Rainbow Tank) by artist and activist Corita Kent, situated prominently on the waterfront of Dorchester. In the mid-1980s, Deschenes enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), intending to study painting or architecture but eventually changing her focus to photography. The pedagogical style of RISD at the time was very conservative and there were few female faculty members in the photography department. As a result, Deschenes sought other contexts for involvement with feminism, queer politics, AIDS activism, examining the power of representation within the medium of photography. Deschenes graduated from RISD in 1988 with a BFA degree in photography. Deschenes worked in photography labs as a technician throughout her career as a young artist, becoming adept at chemical and analogue printing processes. In this capacity, she also worked extensively documenting the artwork of others, which influenced her notion of mediation and the conditions of production and display. In 1997, Deschenes presented Elevation #1-#7 (1997), a set of seven monochrome dye transfer prints whose colors correspond to those developed by cartographers to represent the range of earth's elevation. In the work, by utilizing the process of dye color transfer color printing, which was discontinued by Kodak in 1994, Deschenes investigates the technological changes in the medium. In