About Erin

Erin Elder is a Toronto-based artist working with photography and photomontage to explore presence, memory, and the space between what’s visible and what’s felt. Her practice encompasses two distinct but related approaches: observational photography that documents lived experience, and digitally reconstructed found imagery that explores interior emotional worlds.

Elder's artistic practice builds on over three decades in photojournalism and visual storytelling, including roles as Photojournalist, Photo Editor and Photo Director at Maclean’s Magazine, Asiaweek Magazine, and The Globe and Mail. She served as a juror for the World Press Photo Awards (2008, 2009) and the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward competition (2010-2014). Elder subsequently led the creative studio at Arterra Wines and currently oversees the Canadian Field Research Photography team at CoStar Canada. Her own images have been published in Maclean’s Magazine, Asiaweek, TIME, The Telegraph, South China Morning Post and Toronto Life. 

This professional foundation informs her artistic practice: an understanding of how images function, how narratives are constructed, and how meaning shifts depending on context. Now, rather than documenting only external events, she explores internal ones - the emotional weight of a personal object, the unspoken complexity in a woman’s posture, the gap between how we appear and how we feel.

Elder works in series, each an extended investigation rather than a closed statement. Her primary body of work, Deconstructed, uses sourced female figures,  at times layered with her own imagery,  to explore what we carry beneath the surface and the persistence of female presence. Her photographic series Traces of Meaning explores personal objects as carriers of story, experience, and memory.   

She is represented by Art Interiors and welcomes inquiries from collectors and curators.