About the Photographer

I was born in Philadelphia. I was six when my father died and my mother maxed out her credit cards and moved me and my brother and sister to Rome, Italy, for a year. When we got back, she took a job with the Marlboro Music School, which meant we began spending our summers in Vermont. She passed on when I was fifteen, at which point family friends arranged for me to leave Philly and finish school in Vermont. After high school, I briefly attended the New School in New York, spent a semester with the Tyler School of Art Program in Rome, and then returned to Vermont as a student at Marlboro College. I then moved to Seattle, where I spent the next five years—the longest time I’d spent in one place since before my mother died.

After Seattle I lived in Vermont for a little while, and then I moved to New York to do graduate work at NYU and the International Center of Photography. After getting my Masters, I worked for many years as an imaging specialist (photo retoucher) for Time, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Life Books, and many other publications. I now live in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Throughout my life, I have always taken pictures. Over time, it seemed that no matter what camera or film or printing process I used, all of my photos had the same transitory, dreamlike quality. As I’ve gotten older, I have come to realize that I have been taking pictures of the spaces between places—between here and there, between life and death, between sleep and waking. I think it is fitting that for the last few years my camera of choice has been a cell phone, a device that is in-between a telephone and a camera.

Vaune Trachtman’s book NOW IS ALWAYS, with a foreword by poet Major Jackson, won Trifolio’s Special Prize alongside titles from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Aperture Foundation, and MoMA, and was shortlisted for the 2026 Les Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award, honoring outstanding books in contemporary photography from around the world. Vaune has twice been named to Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, was shortlisted for the international Hariban Award, and received the Olcott Family Award in The Print Center’s international ANNUAL Competition. Her NOW IS ALWAYS series of gravures was recognized as a Top Portfolio by Rfotofolio and an Outstanding Work by the Denis Roussel Awards. She has upcoming solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Athenaeum, Texas Tech, and the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts.

Please contact me if you are interested in exhibiting or buying my work: vaune@vaune.art

Thank you!