Miles Coolidge

Miles Coolidge has presented imagery at the junction between architecture and landscape since his studies under Bernd and Hilla Becher in the 1990s in Düsseldorf, Germany, after graduation from Harvard University in 1986. While his photography often uses the form of traditional typological categorization, at the same time he continuously pursues further investigations on his own terms into spaces people use and scientific processes. In his series, Coal Seam redux, it concerns how scientific and industrial processes seep into the realm of art. On the other hand in Chemical Pictures, this consists of a group of color images that are inspired by the paper chromatographic experiments of the mid-nineteenth century German scientist, F.F. Runge.

Coolidge was born in Montreal, Canada in 1963. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Recent exhibitions include Chemical Pictures, ACME, Los Angeles, 2016; Photographs and Chemical Pictures, Franz Josef Albers Museum Quadrat, Bochum, Germany, 2016; Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2015; Road Trip: Photography of the American West from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musée des Beaux-Artes de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, 2014; American Scene Photography, NSU Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 2014. His work is included in many museum collections including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Baltimore Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Orange County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among others.