07/09/2026
"I’ve been making photographs for 80 years, capturing film and digital images on every continent except Antarctica. Whether in a street scene, a landscape, or a candid portrait, my eye is drawn to a glimpse of the color red. It’s a common thread woven through my work over these many years. This show is a small selection of my photo library and demonstrates that inclination towards a red “highlight.” It encompasses both digital capture and scans of 35 mm slides, printed by me.
I took my first pictures when I was eight, with my father’s 1915 Kodak 2C Autographic, which I carried around in its case “just to be ready.” I saw my first darkroom when I was ten and soon established my own makeshift version in the basement laundry room of my childhood home on 4th Avenue, where I developed film and made contact prints.
By the time I was in college I had my first Leica camera, was newly married, and off to the Philippines for a two-year Naval assignment. There I had no darkroom, and for the first time focused on color photography, using mostly Kodachrome film. Upon release, my wife Terrell and I traveled widely, beginning our lifelong love of travel and capturing color images of the wonderful things to see in this world.
In my first true home darkroom in my 20’s I printed mostly black and white photos, but eventually it became possible to process color film in a home darkroom. It was a tedious process, often demanding over one hour to make one acceptable color print.
The advent of digital photography came in the late 90’s and soon afterwards I retired from my career in the oil business, diving into this remarkable new technology, taking digital photos and printing them on dot matrix printers.
In the last 30 years, I have worked on capturing high- quality images, adjusting them in Photo Shop as I would in a darkroom, and then making higher quality prints than I ever could in a “wet” darkroom. I can also now make high quality digital scans of my library of color slides and color negatives. This show includes both digital photos and photos captured originally on film.
I can now travel back in time through eighty years of my old color slides and negatives and print them out with stunning results. We photographers live in a miraculous age. Thank you for letting me share a bit of my work with you."
- Paul Dougan
To see more of Paul Dougan's work, please pay us a visit. You may also see his pieces on our website at https://www.phillips-gallery.com/New_Site/paul_dougan_june_2026.html. This exhibit, along with David Cassil and Lindey Carteron our Main Floor, remains on display through July 10th.
