Doug Winter
Elk Grove, CA
I am a photographic artist and filmmaker with impaired vision. My work explores the connection between degraded eyesight, memory, truth, and personal history.
Message
Doug Winter (b. 1966, Denver, Colorado) is a photographic artist and filmmaker working with impaired vision. His practice explores the relationship between memory, sensory loss, personal truth, and the experience of grief. It asks how we hold onto what we can no longer clearly see—and how altered sight might reveal something deeper, more honest, and more human.
In 2023, Winter was awarded a $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant for his work advancing disability awareness and accessibility in the visual arts through experimental photography. His photographs are held in the collections of MoCA Italia (Venice), the National Steinbeck Center (Salinas, California), and in private collections internationally, including Mexico City, Berlin, and Tokyo. He received top honors at the 2025 Arte Laguna Prize in Venice, earning a fully funded residency at the Hong Museum in Shanghai. A graduate of the Colorado Institute of Art (Best Portfolio Commendation,1987), Winter is currently an artist-in-residence at KALA Art Institute in Berkeley, California, where he continues to explore what it means to see, remember, and feel through altered vision and the fragile spaces memory leaves behind.
Statement
We often take sight for granted. What happens when vision becomes unreliable? This work asks what happens when memory and perception falter—through sensory loss, accident, or disability.
Inspired by lived experiences of degraded sight, familial blindness, and neurodivergence, the images reflect how the body adapts, grieves, and carries disabilities, both visible and invisible. Each image becomes a moving piece of memory.
Lenses are dismantled and reconfigured, sensors altered, and broken-down, outdated film used without digital correction. The resulting images are unstable and emotionally charged. These abstractions aren't effects; they are translations of how the world now appears through lived vision.
This practice extends a lineage from László Moholy-Nagy's radical experiments with light and material to Uta Barth's insistence on perception itself as subject. Like them, the camera is treated as more than a recording device, as a site of invention and disruption. Yet distortions here emerge from lived impairment, grounding abstraction in embodied experience.
Unstable truths surface when clarity slips away. Rather than certainty, these works hold onto the instabilities and fractures that shape how we see and how we remember.