Like so many photographers, Denise Demong fell emphatically in love with the medium at an early age. She maintained that passion throughout her career as a journalist, author and editor, and once retired, she embraced photography with renewed intensity.

In her work–be it portrait, beachscape, night cityscape or street scene–Denise leans into photography’s capacity to convey mood and emotion. She is passionate about making beautiful, expressive prints.

Her long-term projects include “Light and Water”–images of Fire Island that emphasize the exquisite, shifting color of the light, and “Night Windows”–interiors of New York City apartments, captured from her window after dark, in which humans and their habitats take center stage.

Denise began digitizing her decades-old black-and-white film archive in 2018. “Bellefonte Kids, 1970” comprises portraits of children in that then-hardscrabble Pennsylvania town. “Vintage East Village” consists of NYC street scenes from the same period. Digitizing these negatives has revitalized the work for Denise, who has printed many images for the first time. She has found that digital processing enables her to create larger, more richly detailed and more nuanced prints than she could make in the darkroom in 1970.

Denise has had solo exhibitions in New York City at the Living Room Gallery of St. Peter’s Church and at Pisticci Restaurant, and in Bellefonte, PA, at the Bellefonte Art Museum.

Denise was for many years a teaching assistant at the International Center of Photography, where she studied printing with renowned teacher Ben Gest. Today, living in Connecticut near Long Island Sound, she is exploring new photographic territory. She continues to work as a private tutor helping people master the tools of the “digital darkroom.”