Art

Doug DuBois’ photographs are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NY, SFMOMA in San Francisco, J. Paul Getty Museum and LACMA in Los Angeles, The Museum of Fine Art in Houston, the Library of Congress in Washington DC and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, SITE Santa Fe, Light Works and The John Gutmann Foundation. Doug DuBois has exhibited at The J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; The Aperture Foundation, The Museum of Modern Art and Higher Pictures in New York; SITE, Santa Fe; New Langton Arts in San Francisco; PARCO Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, Museo D’arte Contemporanea in Rome, Italy and The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Crawford Art Gallery and the Gallery of Photography in Ireland. He has published two monographs with the Aperture Foundation, My last day at Seventeen (2015), All the Days and Nights (2009); exhibition catalogues including Where We Live: Photographs from the Berman Collection (2007) with the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort (1991) with the Museum of Modern Art; as well as features in Double Take, The Picture Project, The Friends of Photography, and in magazines including The New York Times, Time, Details, GQ, The Telegraph and Financial Times of London, Monopol in Berlin and Outlook Magazine in Beijing. Doug DuBois received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is an associate professor at Syracuse University and on the faculty at the Hartford Art School’s International Limited Residency MFA program in photography. Dubois made these photographs over a five-year period, starting in 2009, in the town of Cobh, County Cork in Ireland. Ireland had just begun its sharp decline from the boom years of the Celtic Tiger. As part of his residency, he spent two or three afternoons each week, with a small group of young people editing and designing a book of their photographs and eventually asked these kids to show him their neighborhood. Kevin and Eirn, an inseparable couple at the time, took him to Russell Heights. Russell Heights is a housing estate of uncertain vintage that sits on Spy Hill above Cork harbor. The neighborhood is closely-knit: everyone seems to be someone’s cousin, former girlfriend, best friend or spouse. Little can happen there that isn’t seen, discussed, distorted beyond all reason and fiercely defended against disapprobation from the outside. Since he knew Kevin and Eirn, he and his camera were tolerated that first summer. Over the course of four summers with hundreds of photographs made, given away, discussed, remade and argued over, he earned a tenuous but quite touching sense of belonging. This series looks at the bravado and adventure of childhood with an eye toward its fragility and inevitable loss. Some photographs were made spontaneously but most were fashioned collaboratively utilizing a chosen wardrobe, setting and circumstance. While the lives imagined in this narrative should not be confused with the actual individuals that walk the streets of Cobh, the photographs are faithful depictions of adolescent experience, the rhythm and patina of Russell Heights and the anxious countenance of Irish youth.