Angela Donatelli Dugger’s photographic attention began early, often as the family member holding the camera on trips. Later, while studying biology at Central Michigan University, she became interested in microscopy. Preparing specimens, looking through electron microscopes and photographing cellular structures connected image-making with another kind of observation: seeing worlds that are present but normally invisible.
That curiosity still shapes her work. Dugger returns repeatedly to nature, environmental change and small forms of persistence — vines on brick walls, plants breaking through asphalt, traces of life in places that might otherwise be ignored.
“When I slow down and look for these small wonders, I see hope.”
Photography as a way of slowing down
Analogue photography gives Dugger a rhythm that digital work does not. A finite number of exposures changes the way she looks. Developing and printing also become forms of concentration, closer to meditation than to working at a screen.
The same physicality appears in the memories attached to individual images. Light Drawing was made at night with sparklers, her partner and her children. The photograph matters because it brings back the experience of making it together. Waterfall carries a different memory: hiking through the woods with a medium-format camera and tripod, and becoming more aware of the physical effort earlier photographers accepted as part of the work.
Liminal spaces and changing memory
Dugger is drawn to places at the edges of ordinary use. Liminal spaces suggest earlier lives and possible stories: what happened here before, who passed through, what traces remain? That same relationship with time appears in photographs of family. Images of her children can become more emotionally powerful years later, when the people and circumstances in them have already changed.
Returning to hands-on photographic processes after years of digital work renewed her appreciation for photography as a practice rather than simply an image-making tool.
Breaking the rules of cyanotype
Cyanotype became especially important because experimentation opened the process beyond the instructions she had originally been given. Instead of always allowing the chemistry to dry before exposure, Dugger began exploring wet cyanotype techniques and found a depth and unpredictability that generated new ideas.
“Don’t be afraid to experiment. You may find a whole new world.”
Her recent work connects photographic materials with questions about environmental damage, memory, gender and the way institutions shape whose histories are preserved. In pieces such as Shattered and Requiem of Collective Memory, she uses cyanotype and found material to examine how historical narratives and present-day systems can overlap. These interpretations are central to Dugger’s own artistic framing of the work.
What ties the different stages of her practice together is curiosity. Microscopy, film, cyanotype, family photographs and environmental observation all begin with the same gesture: slow down, look closely, and test what happens when the expected rules are not the only possible path.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the photographs we encounter.
