Adam Fuss

Adam Fuss (born 1961) is a British‑born, Australia‑raised photographer celebrated for his cameraless, light‑based works that reinvent early photographic processes. After apprenticing at Ogilvy & Mather in London in 1980, he moved to New York City in 1982, where he first explored pinhole photography and historical techniques.

By the late 1980s Fuss had abandoned the camera entirely, creating single‑image daguerreotypes and photograms in which objects—feathers, water droplets, botanical specimens—are placed directly on light‑sensitive paper and exposed, yielding ghostly, high‑contrast impressions. His large‑scale photograms revive the spirit of modernist innovators like László Moholy‑Nagy and Man Ray but with a contemporary focus on themes of ephemerality, birth, and transformation.

Fuss’s work has been exhibited internationally—including solo shows at Tate Britain, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—and is held in major collections such as the Guggenheim, MoMA, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Through his meticulous studio practice, he continues to push the boundaries of photography’s materiality and its ability to capture the ineffable.