Leo Rubinfien

Leo Rubinfien (born 1953, Chicago, Illinois) is an American photographer and essayist. He lives and works in New York City.

Rubinfien first came to prominence as part of the circle of artist-photographers who investigated new color techniques and materials in the 1970s. His first one-person exhibition was held at Castelli Graphics, New York, in 1981 and he has since had solo exhibitions at institutions that include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Yale University Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art Rome. Among his principal bodies of work are A Map of The East, (published by David R. Godine and Thames & Hudson), which explores the character and idiosyncrasies of Japan, China and Southeast Asia; and Wounded Cities (published as a book by Steidl in 2008), which explores the “mental wounds” that were left by the terror attacks in New York in 2001, and other attacks in cities around the world. He is the author of three books of photographs, A Map of the East (Godine, Thames & Hudson, Toshi Shuppan, 1992), Wounded Cities (Steidl, 2008) and The Ardbeg (Kurenboh/Taka Ishii 2010).

Rubinfien is also an active writer, who has published numerous extended essays on major photographers of the 20th century. He has contributed a memoir, Colors of Daylight to Starburst: Color Photography in America, 1970-1980 (Kevin Moore, Cincinnati Art Museum / Hatje Caantz 2010) and produced the long personal and historical essay in Wounded Citi es, which recounts the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the years that followed. In 2001-2004, he served as Guest Co-curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of the work of Shomei Tomatsu and is co-author of Shomei Tomatsu / Skin of the Nation (Yale University Press, 2004). Since 2010, he has been serving as Guest Curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of the work of Garry Winogrand, which will appear at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2014.

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