Artist Statement
Ever since its inception, the medium of photography has taught its practitioners that the ordinary world around them was filled with a quiet poetry and haunting magic that was unremarked but far from unremarkable. The camera looks at the world with a childlike innocence. As children, we never quite knew what was going on and the world was filled with mystery. The knowledge and experience we have accumulated since then acts as a barrier to our simply looking at things. We no longer look for or see the magic in our “ordinary” surroundings. In my photographs, I try to lose that deadening familiarity and recapture the richness and mystery that we once saw.
Process Statement
19th century - I wasn't born yet.
20th century - I shot B&W film and made silver gelatin prints.
21st century - I started shooting color film and producing c-prints, but fairly quickly switched to digital cameras and pigment inkjet prints.
Christopher Rauschenberg was born in New York in 1951, has practiced photographic art since 1957, and has a B.A. in photography from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He taught art and photography from 1982 to 1996 at Marylhurst College in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
He has photographed in 27 countries and has had 100 solo shows in 8 countries. Available monographs of his work include three books and a deck of cards.
He is a co-founder and co-director of Blue Sky Gallery (an internationally respected non-profit photography gallery – www.BlueSkyGallery.org). Over the last 36 years he has co-curated and co-produced 724 solo exhibitions and 48 group shows at Blue Sky and he has edited and produced over 60 art and photography publications.
He is a co-founder and member of the Portland co-operative Nine Gallery 1987 to present.
In 1995 he organized a group of a dozen artists who joined him in a nine year long systematic photographic exploration and documentation of the city of Portland – and then immediately organized a second group of artists who are two thirds of the way through a second nine year cycle (www.PortlandGridProject.com).
In 1997 and 1998, he took three trips to Paris and rephotographed 500 of the images made of that city by Eugene Atget between 1890 and 1927. A book of his Atget project was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2007.
He was a co-founder and president of Photo Americas (a major photography festival in Portland, Oregon – now called Photolucida) from 1999 to 2003.
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