ABOUT
Craig J. Barber is a NW based photographer documenting farmers and their work — growing our food. For over 30 years he has focused on the cultural landscape in rapid transition, some fading from memory. Barber works with both contemporary and antiquarian processes. His work has explored Viet Nam, Havana, Tuscany, farmers in the Finger Lakes and Catskill Mountain regions of New York and now Skagit Valley in Washington State.
Born in Upstate New York, Barber served in the US Marines for four years, lived in Vermont and Colorado as a ski bum and supported himself as a carpenter in Saskatchewan, Woodstock, and the Pacific Northwest while pursuing his career as a fine art photographer with an eye towards inhabited and ever changing landscapes. Growing up in small town America, surrounded by farms and rolling hills, then working amongst craftspeople influenced Barber’s love of the land, the importance of its care and his respect for the folks who do the hard work that sustains us all.
He has taught workshops and lectured throughout the United States, Ireland, Central Europe and Mexico using alternative cameras and antiquarian processes. In 2006 Umbrage Editions published “Ghosts in the Landscape, Viet Nam Revisited”.
On location in Skagit Valley
Barber has been awarded grants and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Fellowship, Seattle Arts Commission, Polaroid Corporation, Glacier National Park Residency, Light Work, Syracuse, NY and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Ithaca, NY.
His work is represented in numerous public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Chrysler Museum, Center for Photography Woodstock, George Eastman Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Victoria & Albert Museum.
Barber’s photographs have been exhibited in over 70 solo Exhibitions including Working the Land (2013), Recontres D’Arles, Arles, France; Ghosts in the Landscape: Viet Nam Revisited (2007) at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY and (2006) Griffin Museum, Winchester, MA (traveling exhibition 9 years); Rural NY (2004), Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY. Barber’s insightful poetic works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Europe, South America and North America.