Jeanine Michna-Bales

[3][4][5][6] She has often juxtaposed evocative landscape photographs and historical re-enactments with primary source documents such as maps, news clippings, government materials and artifacts in order to bring to life specific moments, experiences, places and eras from the past.

[7][8][9] New York Times writer and cultural historian Maurice Berger called her project on the Underground Railroad evocative and consequential in its visual portrayal of history through the eyes of an individual: "Her photographs are dark, atmospheric and haunting … They evoke both a sense of the adventure and peril of this journey, one that would have dire consequences if unsuccessful.

Her books include Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad (2017), Standing Together: Inez Milholland’s Final Campaign for Women’s Suffrage (2021), and Countdown: A Visual Exploration of the Cold War's Opposing Architecture (co-authored with Adam Reynolds, 2022).

[2][3][26] It involved ten years of research and extensive travel, culminating in a touring exhibition organized by Mid-America Arts Alliance's ExhibitsUSA (2017–27) and a book[27] containing a foreword by civil rights leader Andrew Young, scholarly essays, accounts by passengers themselves, and other historical materials.

"[7] In a subsequent project, The Four Moments of the Sun (2015–present), Michna-Bales took a similar approach to document the forgotten history of Florida's late-18th and 19th-century "maroon" communities—free and formerly enslaved Africans who settled deep in the wilderness of the Everglades to maintain their freedom.

[35][6] In 2021, the project was paired with another by photographer Adam Reynolds documenting U.S. nuclear missile silos in a six-museum traveling exhibition, "Two Minutes to Midnight and the Architecture of Armageddon" (2021–6),[13] which formed the basis of their Countdown (2022) book.

[9] The project consisted of earthquake epicenter portraits depicting an array of everyday landscapes, from rural backyards to freeways in affected areas in Dallas-Ft. Worth, which sits above the Barnett Shale formation.

[23][5][8] The photographs consisted of painterly landscapes chronicling vistas, flora and fauna that Milholland described in letters as well as staged still life and re-enactment images using diverse stand-ins to depict moments in her journey.