Chris Faust

American, b. 1955, Fort Riley, Kansas; lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota

Chris Faust is best known for his black-and-white panoramic landscapes that document ways that cities and rural communities are changing the land according to their own needs. Taken with a specialized banquet-format camera, Faust’s photographs investigate geographic expressions of contemporary environmental values and priorities. Architecture and the natural landscape stand frozen in time in his pictures, which often depict quiet places where people cannot be found. Following projects on rural landscapes, grain elevators, and ore boats, the photographer collaborated with writer and landscape historian Frank Edgerton Martin on the Suburban Documentation Project from 1990 to 1996. The series included images of shopping malls, homes, and of ice parks, focusing especially on the edges of development where landscaped yards, parking lots, and buildings meet undeveloped fields and farmland. Throughout his work, Faust asks us to con- sider these common subjects in and of themselves as spaces that both reflect and determine our relationship to the land that surrounds them. A book of Faust’s nighttime tritone photographs, Nocturnes (2007), was recently published. The artist received his master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. His work has been shown at institutions such as the Tacoma Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Photography, a Bush Fellowship, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.