Mimi Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged photographers whose work explores the landscapes and communities of California and the American West. In 2022, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her ongoing project, The Reservoir.
This coming February 2026, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta will present the first major solo exhibition of Plumb's work, featuring photographs from the 1970s through 2025. The exhibition will travel to three additional U.S museums, accompanied by a comprehensive monograph, Blazing Light, recently published and available from Radius Books.
Plumb has published six monographs. Landfall (TBW Books, 2018), drawn from her work of the 1980s, offers a dreamlike vision of an American dystopia, encapsulating the anxieties of a world spinning out of balance. The book was shortlisted for both the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award (2019) and the Lucie Photo Book Prize (2019). The White Sky (Stanley/Barker, 2020) is a memoir of her childhood in California suburbia, photographed in the 1970s. The Golden City (Stanley/Barker, 2022) reflects on her years living in San Francisco, spanning images from 1984 to 2000. Megalith-Still (Stanley/Barker, 2023) portrays a herd of horses in the High Sierra's John Muir Wilderness, photographed between 1995 and 2005. The Reservoir (Nazraeli Press, 2025) documents receding lakebeds and people gathering at two California reservoirs in the face of drought and extreme heat.
In addition to her Guggenheim fellowship, Plumb is the recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship (2017), California Humanities Grant (2015), a California Arts Council Individual Artist Grant (1989), the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography (1986), and the Marin Arts Council Grant (1999). Her photographs are held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, SFMOMA, the Art Collection Deutsche Börse (Germany), LACMA, Pier 24 Photography, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Plumb earned her BFA (1976) and MFA (1986) in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has taught at SFAI, San Jose State University, Stanford University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.