Martha Madigan, pioneering photography artist and Temple professor emerita, has died at 72

Martha Madigan, 72, of Elkins Park, pioneering photography artist and professor emerita of the photography program at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, died Monday, Aug. 22, of metastatic lung cancer at her home.

Fascinated by art and image even as a child, Ms. Madigan spent her celebrated career exploring camera-less photography, cyanotype, photograms, traditional photography, and other artistic forms. She fashioned her first pinhole camera as a teenager, hosted her first solo show at 23, and went on to create countless dramatic images of colors, shapes, and figures that are displayed around the world.

She was taking selfies long before the term was coined, and her powerful “Daily Portrait” photo project with her family became what she called “an experience of their singular lives” and one of her most personal works. She joined Temple in 1979, became director of the photography program, spent more than four decades as a teacher, curator, and lecturer, and taught at Temple University Rome from 2004 to 2006 and again in 2018.

In an online tribute, Temple officials said: “Working with diverse ecosystems and cultural heritages to evoke reverence for the natural world was her mission as an artist, with a goal to create peace, healing and harmony though the art experience.”

Ms. Madigan’s work has been widely exhibited, displayed at the Wells Fargo Center and Lincoln Financial Field, and resides, among other places, in collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Free Library of Philadelphia, Michener Art Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and California Museum of Photography.

“The process of my work reflects the passages of life, seeking not an understanding of time, but rather an experience of the sacred presence within it,” Ms. Madigan said on her website, marthamadigan.com. “May my work be a boat that carries me safely down the relentless river of time across the ocean of worldliness.”

Using photographic paper, sunlight, objects placed on the paper, and gold chloride toner, Ms. Madigan was able to create forms silhouetted by light that, she said, “make each such print unique, providing the magic of the unexpected.” Some of her most well-known projects are “Human Nature,” “Leaf Drawings,” “Graciela Growth” and “Botanical Portraits.”

Her husband, Jeffrey Fuller, said Ms. Madigan was ”somebody who had to make art. She was driven.” In a tribute, her family said: “She needed to share her creative vision with the world.”

Born Aug. 17, 1950, in Milwaukee, Ms. Madigan earned a bachelor’s degree in art education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1972 and a master’s degree in studio art and photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. Before arriving at Temple, she taught classes in Illinois at Naval Station Great Lakes, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and North Shore Country Day School; and in Michigan at Wayne State University and Cranbrook Academy of Art.

She married Fuller in 1979, and they had son Daniel and daughters Claire and Grace. They lived in West Mount Airy and Germantown before settling in Elkins Park, and she visited artists’ residences, taught, and lectured across the country throughout her career.

She photographed President Jimmy Carter meeting with a group of distinguished artists at the White House in 1978, published some of her work in book form, and received a 1996 Leeway Foundation grant for excellence in photography. The Haggerty Art Museum in Milwaukee staged her first solo museum exhibition in 1996, and she earned numerous other grants, awards, and fellowships from Temple, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and other groups.

Ms. Madigan embraced yoga and meditation, mused often on the beauty of nature, and self-identified as a feminist. Her students called her “inspirational,” with a “peaceful, sweet disposition,” and her younger pupils at North Shore Country Day School lovingly called her “Arty Marty.”

Her daughter Grace said: “She was a Midwestern girl who had the capacity to befriend someone from any walk of life and welcome them into her artistic calm and spiritual nature.” A friend wrote in a tribute: “She exuded light, love and kindness.”

In an online biography, Ms. Madigan said her art sought to reflect “the essential truth in the teachings of nature: death and life as a continuum, the temporary nature of the body, and the struggle between human desire and spiritual evolution.”

In addition to her husband and children, Ms. Madigan is survived by eight grandchildren, a brother, two sisters, and other relatives.

A celebration of her life is to be held later.

Donations in her name may be made to Temple’s photography department fund: In Memory of Martha Madigan, Conwell Hall, 7th Floor, 1801 N. Broad St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19122.