Dennis Church

Dennis Church

“At an early age I experienced moving through vast open spaces, driving trucks, tractors and heavy machinery on my parents’ Iowa farm. So, after buying a camera on a whim, this indelible experience informed my budding improvisational social commentary as a street photographer. And one day on a suburban street an obvious simple intuitive truth struck me forcefully: “This will all change, photograph it now!" My awakening in the epiphany of that moment instigated a deeply felt life-long commitment to create an ongoing visual diary, exploring "now moments" within my visual perception.

Two successful early career public art grants projects, twenty years of commercial photography, in depth academic study of society, added to my early life spatial perceptions in the great outdoors has led to the naturally fitting destiny of me photographing in the street.

I explore complex, compressed colored forms, deciphering how they can be abstracted. I love how color can simultaneously message, confuse and vibrate as it is expressed throughout America’s chaotic, socio-cultural landscape. My quest is to make photographs that organize this chaos into pictures and essays that demonstrate insight, clarity, irony and humor. Streets, open roads and public places, wherever I live and visit, offer infinite possibilities to observe and improvise on these unique moments.”

Dennis Church (b. 1949, MasonCity, IA, USA, based in Bonita Springs, FL, USA) is an American street photographer. He attended Iowa State University and worked for Iowa and Wisconsin State Government bureaus after college, then he attended Apeiron Photography Workshops in New York State. He received several public art grants for documentary projects. He did many editorial, advertising and public relations photography assignments for 20 years.
In 2000, his father died which started him on a very introspective period: he stopped commercial photography and devoted more time to personal work. Dennis Church was recently recognized with inclusion of his photographs in the book "Bystander, A History of Street Photography". His pictures are presented as one of the new directions of street photography by the authors Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck. He is fascinated by both the harmonics and discordances of color. He has exhibited widely in the USA and his works have appeared in hard copy and on-line magazines in the USA, Italy, France, England, Russia and the Czech Republic. His photographs are in several USA public institutions.