Eugénie Shinkle was born in Montréal, Canada in 1963. After initial studies in Engineering, she immigrated to London, England in 1997 to undertake her PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art. She has subsequently established herself as a photographer and academic.
Eugénie Shinkle was born in British Columbia, Canada in 1963. Initially, Shinkle studied civil engineering and pursued a career in the field for about two years. before transitioning to a new discipline and studying for a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and Art History, followed by a Master’s Degree in Photography, Art History, and Landscape Anthropology between 1996 and 1998 at Concordia University in Montreal. She immigrated to London, England in 1997, dividing her final year at Concordia between Canada and England, subsequently completing her PhD in Fine Art Media and Critical Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London between 1999 and 2003.
Shinkle’s artistic and scholarly endeavours spanning more than two decades, integrating diverse disciplines linked by a unified theoretical and methodological emphasis on the tactile and corporeal aspects of our interactions with images and the technologies used to create them. Her body of work encompasses visual and textual creations, demonstrating a deep engagement with subjects including landscape, architectural and fashion photography. Her background in engineering has significantly influenced her photographic approach, centring it around the exploration of space, construction and structures. Shinkle’s interests lie in exploring the nuanced connections between the human body and its environment, the imaginative realm, and the ways in which our physical and perceptual experiences are mediated by images, whether through photography, words, or devices designed to enhance vision. This exploration extends to considering clothing as an architectural element, as well as investigating the foundational structures of the built environment and the natural world. Her research and writing embrace themes of aesthetics, architecture, fashion photography, landscape and modern visual technologies, such as cameras, drones and video games, as well as the relationship between humans and technology. In the period immediately after her undergraduate degree, Shinkle exhibited regularly, before stepping back from the art scene. She has since developed an academic career in education and writing. While she ceased to show her art in public around 2000, she continued taking photographs and in the 2020s started exhibiting again, and she has recently rekindled her engagement in the artistic community. Her collection boasts an extensive array of negatives.
Shinkle’s practice is primarily focused on teaching, writing and producing art. Her book Fashion Photography: the Story in 180 Pictures maps the genre's evolution through almost two hundred significant images, showcasing the role of fashion in reflecting societal shifts and consumer aspirations. It highlights the importance for fashion photography of illustrated magazines, and the collaboration between art directors and photographers in shaping style trends, presenting key figures from the genre’s 150-year history. Shinkle’s photo installation Ideal City (Somebody Else’s Landscape) was exhibited at the Grafting: The Land and the Artist at Photo50 for the London Art Fair 2024. The exhibition was curated by Revolv Collective, a Portsmouth-based, artist run organisation, several of whose members are first and second-generation immigrants. Shinkle’s piece reimagines segments of four landscape paintings by JMW Turner as a way to capture her initial feelings of disorientation and confinement on relocating from Canada to London in 1997. By utilising images of London’s streets as elemental ‘pixels,’ she reconstructs magnified portions of these 19th-century artworks. Ideal City explores the theme of labour through the lens of both emerging and established artists. By adopting horticulture as a methodology – merging of plants and symbiotic growth – the artists engage in intertwining practices while studying a complex ecological system. in 2020 Shinkle received an honourable mention in the annual international photographic competition, the Hariban Award, hosted from Japan.
Shinkle has held the position of Subject External Examiner in Photography at the University of Huddersfield from 2011 to 2014. Since 2011, she has also been Subject External Examiner for Fashion Styling and Photography and Fashion Hair & Makeup at London College of Fashion. As of 2000, she has been teaching at the University of Westminster, as Senior Lecturer in Photographic Theory and Criticism. She is also part of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media at the same institution and editor of an online photobook platform C4 Journal. Shinkle has contributed articles to a range of publications, including 1000 Words, American Suburb X, Aperture, Fashion Theory, Foam, The Journal of Architecture, and Source. Eugenie Shinkle lives and works in West London. Her work is not represented in any UK public collections.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Eugenie Shinkle]
Publications related to [Eugenie Shinkle] in the Ben Uri Library