Eileen Quinlan
November 18, 2025

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.

Quinlan goes into the long-established relationship between photography and mortality and how moments of flux and change are central to her project. For her, this focus on transformation includes both the subject(s) of the photographs as well as the photographic medium itself.

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!

Complete playlist below; tracks in yellow were cut for time.

1. Bring It On Home to Me, Sam Cooke
   
2. Everything She Wants, Wham!
   
3. Ex-Factor, Ms. Lauryn Hill
   
4. Grapevine, Weyes Blood
   
5. Happiness is a butterfly, Lana Del Rey
   
6. Heartbreak Anniversary, GIVĒON
   
7. Idiot Wind, Bob Dylan
   
8. I Know It's Over, Jeff Buckley
   
9. I'm So Tired, The Beatles
10. Isn't It A Pity, Galaxie 500
    
11. Never Let Me Down Again, Depeche Mode
    
12. Pissing In a River, Patti Smith
13. Shivers, The Boys Next Door
    
14. Sour Times, Portishead
15. Trouble, Yusuf / Cat Stevens
16. The Wedding List, Kate Bush
17. You Don't Know What Love Is, Chet Baker

Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972, Boston) earned her MFA from Columbia University in 2005 and had her first solo museum exhibition, My Eyes Can Only Look at You, at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2009. Her first survey show, Wait For It, at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, was held in 2019. In the spring of 2023, Quinlan’s seventh solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, The Waves, was presented.

Quinlan’s work was included in New Directions at the Eastman Museum in Rochester (2024); Changes, mumok, Vienna (2022–23); Warhol, People and Things, Casa São Roque, Porto, Portugal (2022–23); Invitational Exhibition of Visual Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022); Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020), Objects Recognized in Flashes, a major group exhibition curated by Matthias Michalka, at mumok, Vienna, alongside Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, and Josephine Pryde (2019); Passer-by, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, LUMA Foundation,
Arles (2018); VIVA ARTE VIVA, the 57th International Art Exhibition, curated by Christine Macel, Venice Biennale(2017); and Always starts with an encounter: Wols/Eileen Quinlan, organizedby Radio Athènes and curated by Helena Papadopoulos, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens (2016).

Previously, Quinlan participated in Image Support at the Bergen Kunsthall, What Is a Photograph? at the International Center for Photography, New York, and New Photography 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art, and in other group and solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, White Columns, the White Cube Bermondsey, the Langen Foundation, Mai 36, Miguel Abreu Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and Paula Cooper Gallery, and Emanuela Campoli Gallery, among others.