Brian Oglesbee

Brian Oglesbee was born in Chicago in 1951, and first became interested in photography in the sixth grade when he and his father built a pinhole camera together. He studied photography all four years in high school while at the same time beginning working in commercial studios in Chicago . Oglesbee then attended the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied etching, photo-engraving, new forms of photomechanical printmaking, and book-making.

After a career as a commercial photographer specializing in large sets for the Vogue-Wright Studios in Chicago, at that time the country’s biggest commercial photography studio, he moved to upstate New York, where he taught photography and printmaking at Alfred University. During the 1980s he became known for a series of large- format photographs of room-scenes and still-lifes, and began to develop techniques and equipment to fulfill his personal vision of what photography could be. In 1993, Oglesbee was granted a U.S. patent for the invention of his Photographic Studio System, an array of modular components for set- building, camera support, and lighting control.

Oglesbee has been widely exhibited in one-person and group shows throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, and is represented in collections in such institutions as the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY), the International Center of Photography (New York, NY), the Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, FL), the Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne, Switzerland), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), and many private collections, including the Sir Elton John Collection (Atlanta, GA).  He has given lectures and gallery talks throughout the United States , and has twice been granted fellowships by the New York Foundation for the Arts.

His work has been included in Face: The New Photographic Portrait, Flora Photographica: Masterpieces of Flower Photography, and The Joy of Digital Photography. Portfolios of his work have appeared in View Camera, American Photo, Photo/Design, Metropolitan Home, and LuxLife among other magazines.

From 1986 to the present, he has maintained a studio in Wellsville , New York , where he lives with his wife, Mandy. For the past eleven years, Oglesbee has worked almost exclusively on the Water Series, and a book of this work, Aquatique: Photographs by Brian Oglesbee (11"x14", quad-tone, cloth bound, 152 pgs) was recently published by Insight Editions.