Fred Camper

"I am an artist, and a writer and lecturer on film, art, and photography, who lives in Chicago. I have written on cinema for most of my life, have taught at several colleges and universities, have been an art critic and arts journalist since 1989, and have been working on the art I am now showing, digital prints of multiple photographs, since 2002. By my mid-teens, I was interested in math, physics, poetry, classical music, and cinema, mostly American avant-garde film (Brakhage, Markopoulos, Rice) and classical Hollywood (Hitchcock, Hawks). By 17, I was trying to make my own films, and was writing my earliest film criticism. By my early 20s I had completed five 16mm films, and by 1984 had made a version of SN. By then my film ideas had grown impossibly ambitious in comparison to my resources, while I had already, for other reasons, been thinking about combining multiple still photographs in ways that would be somewhat cinematic, something I continued to think about for two decades. Then, in 2002, I started taking digital photos. I first began completing art works using them in 2005, and began exhibiting in September, 2007. This art work has become my principal focus, and now feels like the work I was meant to do for my whole life. There's a longer autobiography on my site. My studio is in the East Bank Storage Building."—Fred Camper (https://www.fredcamper.com/bio1.html)