Marion Belanger photographs the cultural landscape, particularly where geology and the built environment intersect. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the contested landscape of the Everglades. Rather than focusing only on the wetlands in the protected National Park, she ventured into the now drained swampland of the historic Everglades, where housing developments, sugarcane fields, and water control structures occupy the landscape. For Rift/ Fault Belanger photographed the two land-based edges of the North American Continental Plate, along the San Andreas Fault in California, and the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland. Currently, she and collaborator Martha Lewis are artists in residence at the Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station where they are creating a permanent public art installation utilizing historic agricultural archives. Inspired by their studies of roots and soil, Belanger has been making her own studies of roots and soil.
Belanger was an honoree for the 2017 Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography. She is a second time American Scandinavian Foundation Fellow. The artist is the author of Everglades: Outside and Within, with an essay by Susan Orlean (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009), and Rift/ Fault, with an essay by Lucy Lippard (Radius Books, 2016). She resides in Guilford, Connecticut and teaches at the Hartford Art School, and in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University.
