Erica Shires got a late start as a photographer, having elected to raise a son before devoting herself full-time to her art. Over the past decade, she has been making up for lost time, bringing to fashion and fine art a mature vision tinged by intimations of mortality.

Shires came to New York at age 34 to study photography at Pratt Institute, earning her BFA in 2001. Since that time, she has consist-ently brought a personal style to commercial work, marrying art and commerce seamlessly for clients such as Nivea and Nike. Most recently, she completed the spring 2008 look book for fashion designer Brookelynn Starnes's Cloak & Dagger label.

Shires's personal work reveals the deep roots of her work. Growing up in Amarillo, she came of age in the 1970s; she says that Stephen Shore's classic photographs of that West Texas city "are like looking at my childhood." Recently, she has been returning to Amarillo to photograph her father and some of his buddies as they restore and fly the little Cessna airplanes that are popular with Panhandle commuters.

Intrigued by the craft of photography, Shires had been printing her own color work, but has watched as that technology has been swept away by the digital wave. "I just got rid of a color darkroom a year ago," she says. "It's all about the computer now."

Shires, however, has also been making mysterious black-and-white collodion prints on aluminum plates, attracted by the "gorgeous flaws" the antique process creates. "For me, it takes you out of the sense of literalness," she says of the vintage process. "There's so much of that in photography."

Shires describes her own work as "pretty but tragic" and "melan-choly," noting that most of her images are informed by a sense of "impermanence and death." Her most recent project is a kind of anti-fashion statement that combines photos of dead animals on the side of the road with photos of a wraith-like young model who suffers from anorexia. Shires finds it strange that viewers tend to be repulsed by the road kill pictures yet find the images of the ill model beguiling. "People don't notice you're sick," she says of our obsession with thin. "They just notice that you're pretty and look good in your clothes."

PDN's 30 at 10

1999 Taryn Simon Sees the Unseen
2000 Justine Kurland Takes to the Road
2001 Russ Quackenbush Goes West
2002 Susanna Howe Comes Back East
2003 Lisa Kereszi Continues Her Escape
2004 Alec Soth Remains Grounded
2005 William Lamson Goes Video
2006 Erica Shires Photographs Gorgeous Flaws
2007 Kathryn Cook Recalls Painful Memories