Christopher Harris: “20 Years Worth”

The exhibition 20 Years Worth looks back at the varied career of Seattle-based photographer Christopher Harris beginning with series created in the early 1990s to those begun in the last couple of years. Best known for the soft, painterly effects in his highly abstract compositions, Harris often employs a hand-constructed pinhole camera and long exposures. Many branches of the artist's oeuvre are represented, including pinhole photographs from the acclaimed Palouse series which hang alongside earlier, experimental black and white works from Harris' Garden series. His custom and homemade pinhole cameras will also be on view, offering a glimpse into the artist’s process and the possibilities of alternative photography.    

The retrospective glance of the exhibition begins in the early 1990s with black and white silver gelatin prints from the artist’s Homeless series, striking portraits of the homeless population in the quintessential medium of fine art photography, and the Kitchen Floor series, where domesticity is made unfamiliar through unusual points of view. With the Garden series of the late 1990s, Christopher Harris began his exploration of pinhole photography with a home-made hexagonal camera with six lenses, which he used to create a slightly surreal melding of botanical and figurative images harvested from historical family photos.

Later Harris turned to color imagery for his long-exposure pinhole photography with the development of his Palouse series. The artist focused on the brilliant effects of light upon color in vast, rolling, agrarian expanses. Harris’ engagement with color and pinhole photography continued with the Port Susan series, an inlet of Puget Sound that he photographed from a single vantage point through all four seasons from daybreak to nightfall; Two Coasts series featuring seascapes from Cape Cod and Southern California; Prairie series capturing the remnants of the original “Tallgrass” prairie of the America West; and the Skagit series, twilight photographs of the region that has long fascinated Northwest artists.     

In 2006 Harris modified consumer film cartridges with wide-angle lenses to expose tiny negatives in the Scratch series, whose imagery courted the effects of chance. The photographer’s most recent work, the Marlboro Lights series embraces new techniques with high resolution scans of discarded cigarette packs, scavenged from Seattle’s International District and made into monumental images that mark their transformation from uniform consumer products to individualized, elegant typologies.