Chris Verene

Book excerpt: For the past thirteen years, young American artist Chris Verene has carefully documented the strange and yet oddly familiar world of his family and friends. Verene's lush color images reveal freakishly beautiful stories of simple daily joys and troubling family secrets. Curators, critics, and museums from Atlanta to New York and Europe are exhibiting and discussing his moving portrayal of family, love, youth, and aging. The geography of Chris Verene's color photography is primarily social, though the landscape is always a presence. Whether he is following his relatives around the dilapidated environs of Galesburg, Illinois, or locked in a suburban bedroom with five members of his "Camera Club" photographing a half-dressed woman draped over a bed, Chris Verene innerves us with a vision of daily life at once bizarre and banal. His high-key colors and composition occupy a terrain somewhere between William Eggleston and Nan Goldin. This is the artist's first book.