As a suburban teenager, Chris Losee began making black-and-white prints in his basement fallout shelter. He pursued academics in college but was drawn back to image making, earning an MFA in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. There he began experimenting with alternative processes, including Kwik-Prints (gum bichromates), under the mentorship of Bea Nettles.
Chris worked as an art director in New York City, but paused image-making when digital technology became ascendant. In 1996 he moved to New York’s Hudson Valley and started a sustainable farming enterprise and a family, the subject of a memoir he co-authored called Stronger Than Dirt (Crown/Random House, 2003). Once again, however, analog photography drew him back.
He began to connect with people creating hand-made images: In 2018, Mark Osterman at the George Eastman Museum taught him to make salted paper prints. In 2019, Brenton Hamilton at Maine Media Workshops guided him into tri-color gum printing. Rediscovering these processes led him to become once again deeply involved in the practice of photography.
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