MARGET
LONG



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The Medium is the Mirage

Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Rearranging Canon Balls
Blanks I
Blanks II
Visiting Cards
Everyone I Owe

Artist Books
Flash + Cube (1965-1975)
When I Was a Mirage
Removing James Franco 

Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley

Film + Video

Everyone I Owe, 2013



FFamed 19th-century photographer Mathew Brady could not control his spending. He binged on clothing, studio furnishings, elaborate props, and self-promotional materials—amassing debts that eventually drove him into bankruptcy. Everyone I Owe is a transcription of Brady’s handwritten list of creditors, discovered by Long in his 1873 bankruptcy court records at the National Archives.

Brady owed nearly everyone he worked with: photographers, suppliers, lithographers, painters, decorators, bookkeepers, advertisers, lawyers—even a plumber. The work transforms a legal record of financial collapse into a portrait of the artist as debtor, caught between vision and ruin.

Everyone I Owe also gestures toward Long’s own ambivalence about art-making—a day job, the long studio days, the absence of gallery interest, and the recurring expenditures on work that may never be seen. The piece becomes both mirror and ledger: an accounting of what art extracts, and what it leaves unpaid.


Everyone I Owe, 60 x 24 inch inkjet print on Archival Inkjet paper, Marget Long, 2011

PHOTOHOUSE37  
Commercial photography for non-profit organizations.

LINK TO MY HACKED DOMAIN 




Copyright, Marget Long, All rights reserved, 2025