Tessa Traeger's Biography

Tessa Traeger is one of the outstanding still-life photographers of her generation and is widely acknowledged as having raised the subject of photographic, food still-life to the status of art. Trained at Guildford School of Photography and Fine Art, Tessa Traeger has worked and at times lived at Rossetti Studios in Chelsea, London since the 1960’s.

As an artist, she is especially known for her still-life photographs taken on large format cameras many of which were published during her long association with British Vogue. Inspired by some of her illustrious predecessors, Tessa Traeger has sought to balance the demands and developments of both commissioned and experimental work.

She has exhibited regularly since 1978 in Paris, London and New York as well as participating in many group shows. Her work is represented in the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque National in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Citibank collection in London.

Over the last ten years she has been working in the Ardeche region of Southern France to record and celebrate the life of the mountain people and the food they produce, which will become a book to be published by Jonathan Cape in 2008.

Most recently she has been working on a commission from the National Portrait Gallery to photograph the leading British horticulturists of the day and their inspirational gardens, which was an exhibition at the N.P.G. and a book written by Patrick Kinmonth and published by Edward Boooth-Clibborn Editions in English, German and Dutch.