David Benjamin Sherry - Episode 52

In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, David Benjamin Sherry have a deeply personal and moving conversation about the decisions and influences that lead David to pursue photography and to work in the uniquely exuberant and process forward manner that he does. https://davidbenjaminsherry.com David Benjamin Sherry (Santa Fe, NM) is an artist whose work is both challenging and reinvigorating the American Western landscape tradition. His work revolves around interests in environmentalism, queer identity and alternative analog film processes. He’s best known for his colorful landscape work, brought upon by the desire to explore the last remaining wilderness in America. Through numerous projects, Sherry’s work expresses deep concern for the rapidly changing environment, while continuing to sustain a queer sensibility in the hetero-male dominated canon of landscape photography. Sherry has referred to himself as a “nostalgic futurist” and currently uses a large format 8x10 film camera in order to reflect and understand our connection within the contemporary American landscape. Sherry was born in 1981 in Stony Brook, NY and lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He received his BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2007 where he was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize. In 2010 he received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant. Sherry taught Western Landscape and Large Format photography as a distinguished faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018. In the fall of 2020, joined the Yale MFA Photography program as a Visiting Critic. A multi-part installation of his work was exhibited in Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1, New York, a survey show organized by Klaus Biesenbach Connie Butler, and Neville Wakefield. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo presentations and also included in many group presentations including: The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum (2011), New York Minute at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2011), Out of Focus at Saatchi Gallery, London (2012), Lost Line, LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013), What is a Photograph? at ICP International Center for Photography, New York (2014), Fotofocus Biennial, Cincinnati, Ohio (2014) Color Fields at MassArt Museum (2015) and Ansel Adams In Our Time, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2018). His work is in permanent collections at The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus, OH, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, The Saatchi Collection, London, UK, The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, FL, and The Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA Sherry’s work has been featured in many prominent international publications, including Artforum, Aperture Magazine, Architectural Digest, Art in America, Interview Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New York Times, among many others. In September 2014, his work was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. In the spring of 2019, his work was featured on the cover of Aperture Magazine for the Earth issue. There are four monographs of his work: It’s Time (Damiani, 2010); Quantum Light (Damiani, 2013); Earth Changes (Mörel Books, 2015) and his most recent monograph, “American Monuments” (Radius, 2019) features essays by top environmentalists and activists Terry Tempest Williams and Bill McKibben. David Benjamin Sherry is represented by Salon 94 Gallery, New York and Morán Morán Gallery, Los Angeles.