b. 1955, Fort Riley, Kansas
Chris Faust holds a B.A. in biology and an M.A. in educational media. For nearly a decade, he combined his scientific interests with a long fascination for photo technology by producing educational media for scientists at the University of Minnesota.
Eventually Faust turned from servicing others to serving his own vision. For the last fourteen years, the photographer has been making images of landscape, typically using a panoramic format. His wide expansive views reveal the Midwestern landscape in many moods and at various times of day. His night scenes are particularly powerful, as evidenced in Night, a 2001 exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art that paired Faust’s photographs with Mike Lynch’s paintings and drawings.
Faust’s subject is cultural landscape, which the artist defines as “the way that people use private and public landscapes [to] reflect differences in local cultures and [to] mark history.” He teamed up with landscape historian Frank Martin for the Suburbanization Project, capturing the often incongruous juxtapositions that result from rapid development. The 1997 book, Placing Nature: Cultural and Landscape Ecology, edited by Joan Iverson Nassauer, presents Faust’s photographs in dynamic relationship with texts by fiction writers, philosophers, geographers, landscape architects, and ecologists. At Carleton, Faust records a changing landscape, highlighting the junctures between new and old, between architecture and nature, and between on and off campus.
Chris Faust: Photographs | Artist's Statement