Joe Deal

Who was Joe Deal?

Joseph Maurice "Joe" Deal was an American photographer who specialized in depicting how the landscape was transformed by people.

Deal was born in Topeka, Kansas on August 12, 1947, and was raised in Albany, Missouri and St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After his graduation in 1970, he was designated as a conscientious objector by the local draft board and was assigned to work as a guard and janitor at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and its museum of photography. He later earned a master's degree in photography and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico.

While working on his thesis for his MFA degree in the 1970s Deal started teaching at the University of California, Riverside, where he helped establish the UCR/California Museum of Photography. In 1989, he became dean of the School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. He was named to serve as provost of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island 1999, and lived there for the remainder of his life.