Lou Marcus

Founder, Paris Summer Program
PhD, University of Colorado
Phone: 813.974.9325
Email: marcus@usf.edu
Office: FAH 242

Lou Marcus, Professor of Photography, teaches courses in photography and is the founder and coordinator of the Summer Art Program in Paris.

Marcus’s exquisitely detailed and subtly-hued color photographs of the cobblestone streets and the heavily vandalized and eroded Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris capture the tactile atmosphere of a two thousand year2,000-year- old city. Precise, ordered even in their disorder, there is a feeling that even permanence is in flux. Marcus may not have arranged the components of his pictures, but they are, nonetheless, carefully constructed.

Marcus’ work has consistently embraced the tension between absence and presence in the photographic image. He states, “The paradoxical nature of the photograph and its essential dualities, as both representation and authentication, as both an affirmation and a negation of the moment, have sustained and nourished my love and fascination for the medium.” Marcus’ recent work includes installations composed of grids of photographs made in his part-time home of Paris, France. Marcus notes, “This work is the result of an endless fascination with the streets of an urban environment that I find particularly rich and mysterious.”

Marcus received two NEA regional fellowships, two Florida Individual Artist Fellowships, and two University of South Florida teaching awards. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and is held in numerous public and private collections, including those of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the George Eastman House, and the Southeast Museum of Photography. He received his MFA from the University of Colorado and an MA in Media Studies at the New School for Social Research.