Debra Bloomfield


Debra Bloomfield is an American photographer. She has photographed extensively in Mexico, the American Southwest, Alaska, and California, and has taught photography in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years.

Life and work

Bloomfield was born in Los Angeles, California. She received a B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University in 1976 and 1981, respectively. She lives in Berkeley, California and teaches photography at the San Francisco Art Institute.
She has photographed the American landscape for over thirty years. Primarily in color and often in large scale, her photographs are born from an emotional response to location and memory. Her images draw on the visual language of metaphor and explore the relationship between interiority and the external world. Her photographic works include Swimming Pools, Hothouse, Frida/Trotsky, Four Corners, Memory, Oceanscapes, and Wilderness / Up North.
Her work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, among others. She has received the 1991/92 San Francisco Foundation's James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography for her "Trotsky Series", and the 2005 Western Heritage Literary Award in Photography for her monograph "Four Corners".

Publications