Leo Rubinfien

American Photographer | Born: 1953

Leo Rubinfien (b. 1953, Chicago, Illinois) is an American photographer and essayist. He lives and works in New York City.

Rubinfien first came to prominence as part of the circle of artist-photographers who investigated new color techniques and materials in the 1970s. His first one-person exhibition was held at Castelli Graphics, New York, in 1981 and he has since had solo exhibitions at institutions that include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. He is the author of two books of photographs, A Map of the East (Godine, Thames & Hudson, Toshi Shuppan, 1992), and Wounded Cities (Steidl, 2008.)

Rubinfien is also an active writer, who has published numerous extended essays on major photographers of the 20th century. He has contributed a memoir, �Colors of Daylight� to Starburst: Color Photography in America, 1970-1980 (Kevin Moore, Cincinnati Art Museum / Hatje Caantz 2010) and produced the long personal and historical essay in Wounded Cities, which recounts the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the years that followed. In 2001-2004, he served as Guest Co-curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art�s retrospective of the work of Shomei Tomatsu and is co-author of Shomei Tomatsu / Skin of the Nation (Yale University Press, 2004). Since 2010, he has been serving as Guest Curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art�s retrospective of the work of Garry Winogrand, which will begin a world tour in 2013.

Rubinfien�s work has been acquired for numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Israel Museum and the Center for Creative Photography of the University of Arizona. He has held fellowships with the Guggenheim Foundation, Japan Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, and the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University, and in 2009 was awarded the Gold Prize at the 5th Lianzhou International Photography Festival.
Source Wikipedia

Gallery:

Robert Mann Gallery

Selected Books:

Wounded Cities

Author: Leo Rubinfien

Publisher: Steidl

Year: 2008 - Pages: 300

One week before September 11, 2001, Leo Rubinfien, his wife and small children moved into a new apartment next door to the World Trade Center in New York. They witnessed the violence of that day close up, fled with the evacuees and later returned to a damaged home and a city whose wounds have remained open for years. The physical destruction in Manhattan was plain to all, but Rubinfien quickly understood that the hidden "mental wound" was the more profound one, and in 2002 he began to photograph in cities around the world that had suffered severely, in recent times, from terror attacks. Over five years he would visit locations that included London, Nairobi, Kuta Beach, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Istanbul and Colombo, looking intimately at the ordinary people of those cities and searching their faces to see how the anxious air of the terror era had touched and shaped their worlds. Wounded Cities combines 60 intensely evocative photographs from this project with a memoir in which Rubinfien explores the anguish and the political passions of September 11 and its repercussions in an intimate prose style akin to his photography. The book's unusual page design--every page is a fully printed gatefold--weaves Rubinfien's words and images into one of the most original hybrid books photography has produced.

A Map of the East

Author: Leo Rubinfien

Publisher: David R Godine Pub

Year: 1999 - Pages: 132

In this illuminating book, featuring 105 color photographs, Rubinfien defines the character and idiosyncrasies of the Orient.

More Great Photographers To Discover

Francis Meslet

Nationality: French

Born: 1963

A graduate in Design from the Fine Art School of Nancy in 1986, early in his career Francis Meslet was a designer, but soon turned to advertising when he joined several agencies as an artistic director. After 30 years spent questioning the creative concept and studying images in all his compositions, he is now a creative director. Francis does not hesitate to roam the world in his spare time, searching for abandoned sites, sanctuaries where time seems to have stopped after (…)

All About Francis Meslet

Kristoffer Albrecht

Nationality: Finnish

Born: 1961

Born in Helsinki, Finland in 1961. Lives in Ing�, Finland. Albrecht works as an independent photographer.
His photographic work has been exhibited in his native Finland and internationally. Albrecht's work can be seen in collections at Helsinki�s Finnish Museum of Photography, Stockholm�s Moderna Museet, Moscow�s Pushkin Museum, Paris� Biblioth�que Nationale, New York�s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more. Has published some 30 books, among them Metropol (1998), (…)

All About Kristoffer Albrecht

Laurence Leblanc

Nationality: French

Born: 1967

Laurence Leblanc was born in Paris in the early days of June 1967. Starting her artistic training early on, she studied drawing, painting, and gravure as a child at the Mus�e du Louvre�s Ecole des arts d�coratifs. Later on Leblanc studied visual art at the Academie Charpentier, at its historic La Grande Chaumiere workshop located in Paris.

"Each of us has to tell something that nobody else can tell"
-- Wim Wenders.

Leblanc always had (…)

All About Laurence Leblanc

Nicholas Scarpinato

Nationality: American

From nicholasscarpinato.com
My love of photography began at a young age with a camera my parents had at their home. What I choose to photograph is images that tell a story, a secret that is waiting to be unearthed, a memory or a place in time. While the initial photographic capture is important, the ensuing creative process is the distinguishing factor in my work. My images are (…)

All About Nicholas Scarpinato

Max Yavno

Nationality: American

Born: 1911 - Died: 1985

Max Yavno (1911�1985) was a photographer who specialized in street scenes, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. The son of Russian immigrants, Yavno was born in New York on April 26, 1911. He had one sister. He was married at age 19 and divorced three years later. He died in April 1985 of complications resulting from a fall in a shower. Yavno worked as a Wall Street messenger while attending City College of New York at night. He attended the graduate (…)

All About Max Yavno

Erwin Olaf

Nationality: Dutch

Born: 1959

Erwin Olaf (b. 1959) is an internationally exhibiting artist with works in the collections of museums and galleries around the world. Olaf has received numerous highly prestigious commissions and awards. Olaf emerged onto the international art scene when his series �Chessmen� won the Young European Photographer of the Year award in 1988. This was followed by an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, with subsequent solo and group shows at major museums and (…)

All About Erwin Olaf

Martin Munk�csi

Nationality: Hungarian

Born: 1896 - Died: 1963

Martin Munkácsi (born Mermelstein Márton; Kolozsvár, Hungary, May 18, 1896; died July 13, 1963, New York, NY) was a Hungarian photographer who worked in Germany (1928�34) and the United States, where he was based in New York City.
Munkácsi was a newspaper writer and photographer in Hungary, specializing in sports. At the time, sports action photography could only be done in bright light outdoors. Munk�csi's innovation was to make sports photographs as (…)

All About Martin Munk�csi

Monica Denevan

Nationality: American

Born: 1964

Monica Denevan was born in San Francisco and studied photography at San Francisco State University but it wasn�t until she started traveling extensively that she began to see differently. She has been visiting parts of Burma and China for many years, always with her Bronica, an open mind and a sense of humor. Monica�s photographs have been exhibited internationally. Her work had been published in ZYZZYVA, Black+White Photography (UK), F-Stop Magazine, Communication Arts (…)

All About Monica Denevan

Nelli Palomäki

Nationality: Finnish

Born: 1981

Nelli Palom�ki was born 1981 in Forssa, Finland. At the moment she lives and works in Karkkila and Helsinki, Finland. Her timeless portraits of children and young people reveal the fragility of the moment shared with her subject. Palom�ki�s photographs deal with the growth, memory and our problematic way of seeing ourselves. One of the crucial themes in her portraiture is our mortality. She describes: �We fight against our mortality, denying it, yet photographs are (…)

All About Nelli Palomäki

Vivian Maier

Nationality: American

Born: 1926 - Died: 2009

Vivian Dorothea Maier (February 1, 1926 � April 21, 2009) was an American amateur street photographer, who was born in New York City but grew up in France. After returning to the United States, she worked for about forty years as a nanny in Chicago, IL. During those years, she took about 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes in Chicago, although she traveled and photographed worldwide. Her photographs remained unknown and mostly undeveloped until they were (…)

All About Vivian Maier