Born and raised in the Gulf South, Meg Turner came to her artistic practice through an early fascination with the physicality of image-making. The slow, deliberate processes of film photography and printmaking appealed to her long before she understood their technical demands. She studied fine art and photography at university, where she first encountered the wet collodion process—a nineteenth-century technique that would become central to her work. The discipline required by large-format cameras and hand-coated plates taught her a patience that now defines her entire approach. Every exposure, every plate, every print is a meditation on light, chemistry, and time. This foundation in analog methods continues to shape how she sees and responds to the world around her.

New Orleans serves as both home and subject for Turner, its layered geography and resilient culture providing endless material. The city’s relationship with water—its floods, its canals, its slow subsidence—appears often in her images, as does the particular quality of Southern light filtering through live oaks and shotgun houses. Her photographs document not just what is visible but what is vanishing: older neighborhoods, vernacular architecture, the patina of age on ironwork and plaster. Working in wet collodion and film, she captures a version of the city that feels both immediate and archival. The resulting prints carry the weight of place, preserving surfaces and shadows that might otherwise slip from memory.

Beyond her own studio practice, Turner has contributed meaningfully to the local arts community through her work as a master printer and her involvement in shared printshop spaces. She has printed editions for other artists, passing along the technical knowledge required for photogravure and alternative processes. The collaborative nature of printmaking—the shared equipment, the exchange of techniques, the collective problem-solving—has shaped her understanding of what an art practice can be. Though she has stepped back from organizational leadership, the ethos of community remains present in her work. She continues to teach informally, to open her studio, and to participate in the conversations that sustain a vibrant artistic ecosystem.