Elaine Mayes

American photographer Elaine Mayes (born 1936) has developed a significant visual body of work since the early 1960s. A main focus and emphasis for her work has been investigations of "seeing" and documentary forms in photography. This interest led to a number of projects and seeking out various close at hand situations in the world as subject material for her photographs.
Elaine Mayes' photographs have been published and exhibited widely and are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Mayes taught for over thirty years and was Chair of the Photography Department of the New York University's Tisch School of the Arts from 1997 until her retirement in 2001.