ABOUT
Before turning his attention to photography full time, Chris taught design at the Harvard, Columbia and Princeton Graduate Schools of Design, and founded and served for some 20+ years as creative director of Christopher Chadbourne & Associates (CCA), an internationally recognized firm specializing in creating the storylines and exhibitions for some of the country’s most prestigious museums, Arguing that history and science education had become dry presentations of facts and collections of artifacts lacking context and personal narrative, CCA advocated for the power of stories. Using first-person voice, setting context and seeking to establish contemporary relevance, CCA employed time tested media drawn from theatrical stageset design and combined it with layerings of contemporary, often interactive, multimedia. CCA’s designs set attendance records (drawing over 2 million visitors per year to exhibits at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Chicago’s Museum of Science & Industry and a new visitor center at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park). The firm’s work was regularly reviewed in the national press, including the NY Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal as well as Time magazine and on the Today Show.
Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and with the urging of Magnum Photographer Constantine Manos, Chris left CCA in 2011 to pursue his passion for photography. His interest is focused on issues of American Culture and Place, particularly subject matter he feels has been overlooked or falsely stereotyped. Critics have called him a visual storyteller (Aline Smithson) and compared his work to the essays of David Foster Wallace (Bill Kouwenhoven). His work embraces complexity, color, context and the nuances of human behavior. In his first portfolio STATE FAIR: the Last Living Munchkin from the Wizard of Oz and Other Stories, he posited that state fairs were one of the country’s most democratic institutions. The work was a Critical Mass Finalist, was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2014 and has been either exhibited and/or featured in the press in 6 European countries, the USA and South America. At the Festival Internacional de Fotografia in Brazil, images from Chris’ STATE FAIR were used with works from Josef Koudelka and 2 South American artists to create the posters that advertized the Festival. A film of STATE FAIR was also used to set the stage for a discussion/seminar on “the use of Surrealism in photography, both fine art and documentary”.
Chris’ recent portfolio, titled WONDERLAND: Following the Tracks of Beauty and the Beast explores how the railroad right-of-way shaped and reveals the American landscape through the 1950s, when federal funding was diverted from rail to road, as well as its role physically and culturally today. It too has been the recipient of Critical Mass Finalist status, and served as a jumping off place for an NPR interview of the role of creativity in dealing with progressive, uncurable illness. Chris is a member of the Patient Advisory Council to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease Research.