Henry HOrenstein
Henry studied history at the University of Chicago and earned his BFA and MFA at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he studied with legends Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.
Henry's work is collected and exhibited internationally and he has published over 35 books, including several monographs of his own work such as Honky Tonk, Histories, Show, Animalia, Humans, Racing Days, Close Relations, and many others. He has also authored Black & White Photography, Digital Photography, and Beyond Basic Photography, used by hundreds of thousands of college, university, high-school, and art school students as their introduction to photography. His Shoot What You Love serves both as a memoir and a personal history of photography over the past 50 years. His latest monograph, Speedway1972 was published by Stanley/Barker (UK) in 2022 and We Sort of People will be published fall 2023 by Kehrer Verlag (Ger).
In recent years, Henry has been making films: Preacher, Murray, Spoke, Partners, and Blitto Underground. He is currently in production on Marksville, LA, a film about Cajun Louisiana.
Henry is professor of photography at RISD and lives in Boston.
“When I started this series, I was more than a bit insecure about it. So many great (and not so great) artists had tackled similar subjects since the beginning of time. How could I presume to add to this daunting history? One thing I did not want to do was simply document my animals, so I chose not to shoot in color and not to show environment. Rather, I choose to look closely and abstractly - to see my subjects for their inherent beauty, oddness, mystery. For this, I shot often with macro lenses and close-up filters, so I could get close, and worked with grainy, over-processed film and printed in sepia to give them an old-school, timeless feel. - Henry Horenstein
Available worK
past exhibitions
Animalia | January 7 - February 5, 2022