As a photographer, Mark Maio ’92 was always drawn to industrial cities in the northern U.S. and the stories emerging from their ethnic neighborhoods. When he enrolled in an Empire State University course titled “Ethnic Neighborhoods in Northern Industrial Cities,” his professor encouraged him to document his observations through photography.
A 16-week class evolved into a 16-year project. The work will be exhibited this fall at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY, under the title “Against the Grain” (opening October 10, 2025, through April 26, 2026), with a corresponding book published by Fall Line Press the same October.
Maio’s black-and-white photographs focus on Irish laborers called “scoopers” who unloaded grain ships in Buffalo — once a major port where the Erie Canal met the Great Lakes, with grain shipped via canal or stored in elevators along the Buffalo River.
From Milwaukee to the Clinic
Maio grew up in an ethnic Italian neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his grandparents had immigrated from Sicily in 1910. “We were lower income and blue collar,” he says. He began photography in high school, drawing inspiration from “Life” magazine photographers like W. Eugene Smith and Margaret Bourke-White, hoping “to do something to help people with my photography.”
After earning an associate degree in photography from Milwaukee Area Technical College, Maio specialized in ophthalmic photography — documenting eye conditions for medical diagnosis. He taught at Emory University, served as an adjunct at Rochester Institute of Technology, and held clinical assistant professor rank at the University at Buffalo medical school, where he developed a B.S. program in ophthalmic photography.
Unable to pursue advanced degrees while working full time, Maio found that SUNY Empire’s flexible model let him build a degree aligned with RIT’s own program. He graduated in 1992 with a B.S. in biomedical photography — his family’s first college graduate — and later earned a master’s in humanities and an MFA in photography from UB.
Back Roads, Not Runways
Rather than pursuing European travel or celebrity photography like many of his peers, Maio focused on documenting American stories. “I’ve been to all 50 states and traveled mostly on back roads,” he says. In 1999, he developed the first high-resolution digital imaging system in ophthalmology, and later served on Adobe’s Biomedical Imaging Advisory Group, helping develop Photoshop Extended.
Maio sees the creative process in ophthalmic and fine art photography as fundamentally the same, differing only in expression. The Burchfield Penney exhibition is the highest-profile showing of his fine art work to date, though his photography already lives in the George Eastman Museum’s permanent collection. “Photography is not a hobby,” he says. “It’s my life, both in ophthalmic photography and the fine arts.”
