Julie Saul Gallery

Sally Gall was born in Washington, D.C. in 1956. After attending Reed College and receiving a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978, she settled in Houston, Texas. In 1987, the artist moved to New York City. Until recently, Gall worked solely in black and white photography, using nature as her subject. She completed an extensive series of Diana camera images of European formal gardens in the mid-1980s. Later, she switched to the Hasselblad which maintained the square format but significantly altered the focus and technical quality of her work.

Sally Gall is known for her sensual interpretations of nature in which she combines impressive printing skills with her rigorous yet romantic vision. Her work describes and interprets the visible world with an experiential rather than literal interpretation. For more than twenty five years she has maintained her interest in landscape, emphasizing different aspects of nature through her various series. In the early 1980s, she worked in formal gardens throughout Europe- from Tivoli to Blenheim Palace. She created many bodies of work based on her travels in Brazil, Scotland, Bali, New Hampshire, Bequi, and France. She sometimes incorporates the human figure in her work, photographing the body as an extension of nature rather than as a portrait or figure study. Although the sites are diverse, her work is unified by a great feeling for abstract form as well as a particular feeling for water. In 2002, Gall completed a body of work entitled "Into Darkness" with the subjects of caves and grottoes, focusing on the "twilight zone" between daylight and darkness. In 2005, Gall began to work in color, switching from her lifelong involvement with black and white. In her series "Blossoms," she worked closer to home in New York City on a refined investigation of nature, capturing the vivid colors of blossoming trees in Central Park.

Continuing her work in color photography, Gall created the series "Crawl" (2007) in which she closely examined tiny creatures such as worms, spiders, and butterflies, living in close and extended proximity to a formerly agrarian environment in Italy. In her most recent project entitled "Web" (2009), Sally Gall returned to black and white photography, capturing the detail of intricate spider webs with abstract precision.