Bill Travis

Who is Bill Travis?

Bill Travis is an American photographer known for his landscapes and cityscapes.

His discovery of photography came through art history—he earned a Ph.D. in medieval art and taught at the university level for several years—and this background has influenced his creative work. From 1995 to 2002, his photography of medieval sculpture and architecture appeared in print in prestigious journals, ranging from Arte medievale to Artibus et Historiae, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.

Beginning in 2003, he expanded his subject matter to the human figure and took to experimenting with photographic transfers on gilt boards, using a technique of his invention that let the gold shine through to the surface. The result is something close in spirit to the Byzantine icon. More recently, Travis has developed other techniques that explore the frontier between painting and photography, such as transfers on glass, mother of pearl, and tinfoil. The cities he has photographed most extensively are New York, Paris, Rome, Perugia, Venice, Lisbon, Dresden, and Prague. For the past several years, he has photographed parks, gardens, and other sites of historic significance, including Versailles, Sanssouci, Hadrian's Villa, Central Park, Cape Ann, Gettysburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, and Montpelier. His series of botanical gardens includes examples in Berlin, Lisbon, Dublin, and Los Angeles. Since 2009, he has also worked on various photo-based artist books and scrolls.