G. M. Donley is a writer, designer, and photographer from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. During three decades in various creative and editorial roles at the Cleveland Museum of Art, he maintained parallel freelance endeavors in journalism and fine-art photography. His essays are included the print compilations ""Dispatches from the Rust Belt"" (Belt Publishing 2015) and ""Voices from the Rust Belt"" (Picador, 2018). He is author of the books ""Art Spaces: The Cleveland Museum of Art"" (Scala, 2013), ""A Small Book About Design Craft and Practice"" (Miscagon, 2023), ""Night Music"" (Miscagon, 2023), ""Crombie Hill"" (Miscagon 2024), ""The Legend of Castle Cove"" (Miscagon 2024), and ""The Virtues of Alignment: Stories and Not Stories"" (Miscagon 2024).
Music photographers deal with the dilemma of the artist's identity dominating the image and the viewer's reaction to it. By blurring that identity in a veil of abstraction and anonymity, Donley's images more accurately convey the visceral experience of being at a show in a small, closely packed room: the vibrations of the sound, the flare of the lights, the smell of the crowd, the humidity of the room. -Anastasia Pantsios, journalist and photographer, CoolCleveland.com, Scene, Free Times, Plain Dealer.