Eli Durst

About Episode 110

Photographer and educator Eli Durst joins PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss his photobooks, artistic practice, and the evolving definition of documentary photography. Durst reflects on what it means to push and rethink documentary work today, from image-making to long-term engagement with subjects and place.

Drawing on his experience working with Joel Meyerowitz, Durst also shares how he learned to build a sustainable life as an artist, balancing creative work with family. He discusses the role of mentorship, ongoing learning, and how collaboration with publishers and editors can reshape a project through new perspectives on sequencing and editing.

The conversation also explores the importance of community in documentary practice, and how embedding within a community is often central to the work, sometimes even more than the act of photographing itself.

About Eli Durst

Eli Durst is a photographer based in Austin, TX where he teaches at the University of Texas College of Fine Arts.

Eli received an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art and is the winner of the 2016 Aperture Portfolio Prize, a 2017 Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, a 2019 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. Eli is the author of three monographs, The Community (Mörel Books, 2020) and The Four Pillars (Loose Joints, 2022) and The Children’s Melody (Gnomic Book, 2025).

Eli’s work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Der Spiegel, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, Wallpaper, and Texas Monthly, among others.