The Selection Committee Radio Show with Eileen Quinlan, 11/18/25

Appropriately enough for her gritty, challenging, yet lyrical work, the great photographer Eileen Quinlan joins me with a playlist about heartbreak.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Quinlan discusses the arc of her career, from her breakout body of work in grad school to her most recent experiments. Consistent throughout her explorations in photography is a focus on process, mortality, and the haptic.

Working in a “wrong and slightly backwards way,” Quinlan has always used experimentation as a key modality in her process; her failures become a kind of language, the focus of the work, the evidence of her struggle or hand. We discuss how she came to work in this way—her background in advertising and commercial photography and her early fascination with spirit photography—and how the process has informed her development as an artist.

With a great sense of humor Eileen Quinlan tackles big questions of photography and life—listen in!