American photographer Martha Casanave (b. 1946) is the 34th recipient of the Fresno Art Museum’s Council of 100 Distinguished Woman Artist Award. She is also a writer and educator, living and working in Monterey, California.

Casanave has been one of the few women photographers in a male-dominated regional artistic circle that included Ansel Adams and Brett Weston. Her dedication to her career and her contributions to the field of photography were strong factors in the Council of 100 choosing to honor her. Her approach to her subject matter is innovative in both technique and vision. Casanave situates the subjects of her portraits in their respective environments in a way that reveals aspects of their character and interests. With her degree in Russian Language and Literature, Casanave’s photographs taken during her many trips to the USSR raise our consciousness by revealing either the lives of underground artists or the social graces experienced in interactions with the general populace. In all of her work, Casanave experiments with traditional photographic techniques and alternative processes and does not work with digital images.

This solo exhibition Imaginings: Portraits and False Flag, with its accompanying catalog, features 27 large-scale photographs focusing on two different photography projects: 12 black-and-white portraits of famous women and men of the art world, and 15 color prints of selections from her USSR project.

Martha Casanave won the prestigious Imogen Cunningham Photography Award in 1979 and the Koret Israel Prize in 1989. Her photography is published in four monographs, and she has taught photographic workshops and master classes in the United States and abroad. Her work has been shown internationally as well as nationally and is in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.