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 living with impaired vision, including visual snow syndrome. Shaped by witnessing his father’s sudden loss of sight and adapting to his own partial vision loss following a stroke-related change in vision, he treats the camera as a conceptual mechanism, not a tool of documentation. Working without digital correction, he physically modifies lenses and sensors and uses degraded film materials to investigate how vision and memory shift, fracture, and rebuild with each act of remembering, and how the photograph can fail as evidence and truth.
In 2023, Winter received a $10,000 Seeding Creativity grant funded by the National Endowment for the Arts through the American Rescue Plan. In 2024, he was a semifinalist for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2025 (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery). A finalist for the Arte Laguna Prize, he exhibited at Arsenale Nord, Venice, and has been selected on three occasions by separate Arte Laguna juries for exhibition, including Arte Laguna’s 20th Anniversary exhibition at EKA·Tianwu Creative Park (Jinqiao, Pudong), Shanghai. Through Arte Laguna, he received a fully funded one-month residency at the Hong Museum (Shanghai branch), China. His works are held in the collections of MoCA Cultural Association, Venice (2 works), Hong Museum (Shanghai branch), China (4 works), and the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, California (1 work). He is an artist-in-residence at KALA Art Institute in Berkeley, California, and is a graduate of the Colorado Institute of Art (1987).
Statement
My work begins from a place of instability. What I see and how I see it are not stable. I live with impaired vision. I see around and through objects permanently embedded in my field of vision, and that instability shapes how I move through the world and how I decide which images and memories are really telling me. Rather than treating the camera as a device for copying or documenting the world around me with clarity and sharp focus, I use it to show what it feels like when vision and perception are uncertain and drift from the truth.
I physically modify lenses and optical elements, like paper, plastic, and glass, so focus never fully resolves. What appears as blur or inaccuracy is deliberate. It is not an effect added after the fact, but a condition and intent built into the photograph the moment it's created. The work pushes back against the idea that sharpness and straight representation automatically mean truth and that a viewer is owed full access. I’m attracted to what happens when an image won’t behave: when it won’t settle, when the edges give way, when the subject can’t be held cleanly into one place. The blur is deliberate, refusing full access. Sometimes memory begins with impaired vision. Tears of happiness or sorrow become a lens, blurring the world around us when it matters most. The blur is not nostalgia. It is a survival response. Sometimes memory protects by removing details. Other times it returns with unwanted clarity, persistent and intrusive, even “sticky thoughts.”
Failure of focus shows how memory resists our control, how vision becomes a record of loss, and how the photograph fails as evidence, as a document of truth. My art practice is built on the belief that memory is formed through bodily impairment and emotional levels of joy, fear, grief, love, and shame, and these factors weigh deeply when memory is written within us. Over time, memory breaks apart and may invent or clarify. Sometimes it protects by allowing details to fall away. Other times, it returns with unwanted transparency. My photographs hold that contradiction. They treat distortion as both description and boundary. Acknowledging what vision cannot reliably deliver and insisting that the mind, when setting boundaries, can be a form of care.
As I move closer to the center of what I’m investigating, the work becomes increasingly personal and raw. I work across multiple media, but light and time are the core materials I use. It’s the heart of my practice, so the work is growing larger, more physical, and more personal, moving into installations, sculpture, natural phenomena, and monoprints.
The work isn’t about clarity. It’s about living inside uncertainty.