Chris Bennett is a Photographer living in Portland, Oregon. He received his BFA from Indiana University and MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School’s Limited Residency Photography Program. Bennett founded and was the Executive Director of Newspace Center for Photography from 2002 to 2012 and served as the Gallery Director from 2012 to 2014. He has recently exhibited his work in Portland at Froelick Gallery, the Oregon Historical Society, Camerawork Gallery as well as nationally and internationally at The Phoenix Art Museum (AZ), Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe, NM), INOVA (Milwaukee, WI), CCY (New York, NY), Circuit Gallery (Toronto) and Kominek Gallery (Berlin). Today we share his series, The River Stays.
The River Stays
My work investigates issues of place, time and memory by exploring how the environment in which I live and its history guides my views and perceptions. By studying historical aspects of a region and employing philosophical aspects of time, being and place, I hope to inform my internal dialogue and weave together a visual narrative that can somehow convey my subjective internal response to the experience of the external and sometimes unsettling world I encounter.
The River Stays contains photographs shot along the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington. The Columbia River represents an American West that for most of the past two centuries has summed up progress, patriotism, and virtue in a single word: conquest. I set out to follow the path of the West’s most beautiful and thoroughly conquered rivers. I have spent the last four years making these images traveling only half the distance of the river into Central Washington. My plan with this project is to continue traveling and shooting along the river to its source near Banff Alberta Canada.
To see more of Chris’s work, check out his website.