Larry Chatman
© Larry Chatman
About Larry Chatman
I consider myself a cultural anthropological photographer. I examine the physical and social elements that I find curious and I visually comment on them. Making images that inform and challenge one’s beliefs or convictions has been my primary goal. I expect my work to engage the viewer in a dialogue about the elements of human activity that I question. I utilize color, light, perspective and visual relationships to make images that initially engage the viewer by their beauty and support the awaiting conversation.
My process is pretty simple. I’m a photographer, my interests are social/anthropological. What interests me is human behavior. Why we as human beings do the things we do and what the consequences of our are is the subject of my work. I do not actively pursue questions and my work is not driven by ideas of what to photograph. I wander city streets and photograph what interests me as all photographers do. I acquire thousands of images over several months, and then put them away for a few months to gain so distance from them. When I go back to view them, I approach them as if they were not mine. I ask myself, “What do all these images have in common?” Through this process I often discover what my project is. Right now I’ve been photographing in cities that had large segregated black neighborhoods. I’m revealing the legacy of desegregation and how many, once thriving black neighborhoods are now empty and decaying cancers. It makes me wonder whether the benefits of housing desegregation were worth the cost.
I grew up in St Louis, Mo in 1951. I went to college at Southern Illinois University with a major in Pre-Med. I never took an art class in either highschool or college. I discovered photography in my Junior year at SIU. I dropped out of pre-med and decided to major in photography. After getting my Bachelors Degree I went to Ohio University and received my MFA in Photography.
My work has been shown both nationally and internationally. I have exhibited at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Milwaukee Art Museum, Madison Art Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Art institute of Chicago,
East Side Gallery in New York, The Sharon Lynn-Wilson Center of the Arts in Brookfield Wisconsin and many others.