These pages celebrate what it means to be alive…ecstatic, hilarious, challenging, painful, intense and sublime…it is the stuff of myth and legend as we experience it in our ordinary lives. These pictures are my attempt to see the numinosity of this experience. I would like to thank the extra-ordinary people who have made this work with me.

I was born in New York City in 1954 and moved to Ireland in 1966. In Trinity College, Dublin I studied English Literature and History. I developed an abiding love for both and have since come to see these as an essential part of my artistic training. The words of poetry and drama required inner visualisation. History gave me a sense of the bigger picture. For the remainder of my 20s I worked in printing and publishing. I began painting full time in 1985, making three dimensional work in 1989 and photo-based work in 1998. In the last decade, I have spent much of my time swopping stories with the people I photograph. We try to realize common symbolic elements in our shared inner landscapes. The images often have a mythic quality to them. This is because I believe we should see our lives as epic adventures, our struggles as heroic.

For me the creative process is more like movie making than stills photography. For each full day photoshoot there is a month of preparation and post-production: developing concepts, scripting, costume making, finding locations and props, the shoot itself and finally editing. Many of the people that I photograph participate actively in several aspects of this creative process, particularly in developing the concepts.

“The men and women in Doug Ross’s pieces have flawlessly porcelaneous skin and bodies too beautiful to cover in anything more than veils, sarongs and loin cloths. Always solemn in expression and often in reverently elegant poses, they are holy beings reminiscent of the Madonna, druid priestesses, nymphs, and Biblical queens. Holiness and physical beauty seem intertwined to the point where one might go so far as to say that the subjects are beautiful because they are holy or holy because they are beautiful.”  – Eugene Hwang, reviewing my work at the Ico Gallery, New York City.

RECENT NEWS

2025: Since its re-opening in October of 2024, I have exhibited 14 images at the Los Angeles Center For Digital Art. I expect to have a solo show in LACDA in 2026. In  2025, I exhibited in November 2025 as part of the exhibition “Sex and Politics” at the Bastille Design Centre in Paris. I continued my creative partnership with Sigrife, shooting for the fourth summer in a row. 18 images from our 2023 shoot were published in ION magazine in their May/June 2025 issue. I have continued as a quarterly contributor to NyghtVision magazine throughout 2025. Sultry magazine, published in Mexico City carried a feature “Skin and Bones” in June 2025 that I made with Patsy Pleasure.

After a three year hiatus, Lucy Holmes and I resumed our creative partnership with three shoots in 2025. (12th, 13th and 14th shoots.) I expect we will shoot again in 2026 and continue to exhibit and publish our work regularly. “The Spirit of Beauty” a book of images with Lucy Holmes was published in March 2021 and was finally launched in June 2022. (On sale here: https://www.blurb.com/b/10639779-the-spirit-of-beauty  and a few discounted copies available directly from me at €60 plus postage).

I have begun collaborating with a couple of people in 2025 and expect to continue in 2026, with video work and poetry forming some new departures. I will be continuing photographic work.