Richard Ross
Professor
Photography
Richard Ross is a photographer, researcher and professor of art based in Santa Barbara, California. Ross has been the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Fulbright, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. Ross was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 to complete work on Architecture of Authority, a body of work of thought-provoking and unsettling pictures of architectural spaces worldwide that exert power over the individuals confined within them. Aperture Press published the work in 2007; it was also named one of the best exhibitions of the year by ArtForum.
Ross’s Guggenheim support also helped launch an investigation of the world of juvenile corrections and the architecture encompassing it. This led to Ross’s most recent work, Juvenile-in-Justice, which turns a lens on the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them. The project includes images of over 1,000 juveniles and administrators at over 300 facilities in 30 states in the U.S. Juvenile-in-Justice will be published as a book in 2012. The work will be shown as a traveling exhibition starting at the Nevada Museum of Art in Fall 2012, University of Paris, Nanterre in Spring 2012 and Ronald Feldman Gallery in 2013. The work was recently featured in a 6-page photo spread in the October 2011 edition of Harper’s Magazine.
Ross was the principal photographer for the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Museum on many of their architectural projects. In addition to the Getty, he has photographed extensively for the World Monuments Fund, Canadian Center for Architecture, Nike, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, SF Examiner, Vogue, Esquire, la Repubblica, Le Monde, COLORS, Courrier, and many more. A dozen books of his work have been published including Architecture of Authority (Aperture 2007), Waiting for the End of the World (Princeton Architectural Press 2005), Gathering Light (University of New Mexico 2001) and Museology (Aperture 1988).
Ross has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1977.
