MICHAELCHRISTOPHERBROWN
Biography
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Michael Christopher Brown was born and raised in the Skagit Valley, a farming community in Washington State. His recent work, Libya, will be in the group exhibition War/Photography: Image of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath, opening in 2012 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Annenberg Space for Photography, the Corcoran Gallery and various international venues. Over a seven-week period in 2011, Brown documented the face of battle in Libya using a camera phone, challenging the standard script for war reportage. Brown forms a series that moves beyond documentary realism and across the distinction between art and journalism, exploring ethical distance and the iconography of warfare.
His previous work, Xiasi(2010), or Reverie, a two-part series produced during train and road trips in China, presents solitary figures seemingly removed from the world’s most populous country. The images are as much a study of Chinese identity as a reflection of Brown’s nomadic experiences. In Broadway (2009), he examines the famous New York thoroughfare through its’ archetypes and amidst the global financial crisis. Sakhalin (2008) depicts an enigmatic wintry atmosphere of the sparsely populated and remote Russian island, long scarred from the Soviet era and left behind in modern times.
Brown recently exhibited work at the Instituto Cervantes, New York (2011), and the Steven Kasher Gallery, New York (2010). In 2011 he was a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography as well as a finalist for the Emerging Photographer Award (Magnum Foundation / Burn Magazine) for the third year in a row. Brown won the Juror’s Choice Award in the Santa Fe Project Competition (2009), is a former participant of the World Press Joop Swart Masterclass (2008) and was named one of fifteen emerging photo pioneers by American Photo magazine (2007). A graduate of the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University (M.A. 2003), his photographs have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts, including PBS, NPR, Time, Newsweek, Geo, Foam, Smithsonian, The New York Times and The Atlantic. Since 2005 Brown has been a contributing photographer at National Geographic Magazine.