Leo Rubinfien, born in Chicago, Illinois, is a photographer and essayist from the United States. He currently resides and works in New York City. Rubinfien rose to popularity in the 1970s as a member of a group of artist-photographers who experimented with new color processes and materials.
In 1981,
Leo Rubinfien had his first one-person exhibition at Castelli Graphics in New York, and he has since had solo exhibitions at 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 in Washington, DC, the
National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and the
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. He is the author of two photobooks,
A Map of the East (Godine, Thames & Hudson, Toshi Shuppan, 1992) and
Wounded Cities.
Leo Rubinfien is also a prolific writer, having produced numerous extensive essays on famous twentieth-century photographers. He contributed a memoir,
Colors of Daylight, to
Starburst: Color Photography in America, 1970-1980 (Kevin Moore, Cincinnati Art Museum / Hatje Caantz 2010), and wrote
Wounded Cities, a long personal and historical essay about the September 11th, 2001 attacks and the years that followed.
He was the Guest Co-curator of
Shomei Tomatsu's retrospective at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 2001 to 2004, and he is the co-author of
Shomei Tomatsu / Skin of the Nation (Yale University Press, 2004). Since 2010, he has served as Guest Curator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of
Garry Winogrand's work, which will embark on a world tour in 2013.
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
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and the Fogg Museum have all acquired Rubinfien's work.
Leo Rubinfien has received fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, Japan Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, and New York University's International Center for Advanced Studies, and he was given the Gold Prize at the 5th Lianzhou International Photography Festival in 2009.
