McAdams, Dona Ann. Dona Ann McAdams: The Garden of Eden. November 7 - December 31, 1997.

Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery, Syracuse University. No. 50. Photographs of people with mental illness. [McAdams had been working for 14 years on this project at time of exhibition.] Includes black-and-white and hand-colored photographs. Introduction by Jeffrey Hoone, Director, Light Work. Essay by Brad Kessler. Wraps, exhibition catalog, 32 pages, fine with very minor signs of use. 

Born in 1954 in Queens, New York, Dona Ann McAdams is an American photographer, social documentarian, and activist renowned for capturing subcultures and grassroots social movements. Her artistic trajectory was reshaped in the 1970s in San Francisco, where her friendship with politician and camera shop owner Harvey Milk taught her to harness photography as a tool for social change. Over a career spanning more than four decades, McAdams documented nuclear protests, AIDS activism, the Queer Liberation movement, and the avant-garde New York performance art scene—notably serving as house photographer for Performance Space 122 for over twenty years. Her work has been exhibited at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the International Center of Photography. Alongside her documentary work, she dedicated much of her career to community-based art education, leading photography workshops for underserved groups, residents in mental health facilities, and backstretch workers at horse racetracks. Today, she resides on a goat farm in Vermont with her husband, writer Brad Kessler.

Dona Ann McAdams: The Garden of Eden is a photography exhibition catalog published by the Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery at Syracuse University. The volume documents a solo exhibition that ran from November 7 through December 31, 1997. It features an introduction by Light Work director Jeffrey Hoone and a critical essay by author Brad Kessler, serving as a powerful visual testament to the lives of people living with severe mental illness.

Key Focus Areas

• The Core Project: The publication highlights a portion of McAdams’ multi-year participatory project with institutionalized, homeless, and mentally ill individuals—specifically focusing on a community living with schizophrenia on Coney Island, New York.

• Collaborative Agency: A major theme of the volume is the concept of empowerment and shared authorship. Rather than presenting the subjects merely as passive targets of a documentary lens, the project highlights collaborative artwork where the participants directly hand-colored and wrote on McAdams' original silver gelatin prints using oil pastels and colored pencils.

• Humanizing the Invisible: The collection deliberately works to break down the societal stigma surrounding psychiatric conditions. Through intimate, respectful portraits, McAdams and her collaborators provide a nuanced, deeply humanized glimpse into daily life, creativity, and the internal worlds of a heavily marginalized urban subculture.

• The Visual Approach: Curated down into a slim showcase of plates, the catalog emphasizes a raw yet deeply sensitive aesthetic. It relies on the distinct, grainy textures of black-and-white film juxtaposed against vibrant, expressive overlays of hand-applied color to give form to the subjects' lived experiences.