Jeff Wassmann

Cornell's parents were both from socially prominent New York families of Dutch ancestry, while Wassmann's mother, a Furber, could trace her lineage back to the Revolutionary War's General Richard Furber, and beyond that to William Furber's arrival in the New World from Devonshire on one of Sir Walter Raleigh's ships on August 14, 1635.

The art critic Robert Hughes attributes much of Cornell's artistic sensibility to his East Coast moorings.

In The Shock of the New he writes, "Cornell would admit nothing to his memory theatre that was not, in some degree, elegant. This may sound a recipe for preciosity, but it was not, because Cornell had a rigorous sense of form, strict and spare, like good New England cabinetwork."

Wassmann grew up influenced not only by his deep family roots, but more immediately by a Pennsylvania Dutch community in nearby Butler County, which only heightened his aesthetic for the spartan design and precise, but elegant, carpentry he saw in his Amish neighbors.

He would go on to spend several years studying with the German cabinetmaker Ernst Zacher and would not undertake his first boxed work until he had reached the maturity of his early forties.

Wassmann first encountered the boxed assemblage and collage works of Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) at the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-1970s, not long after the artist's death in 1972.

Perhaps with the confidence of youth Wassmann once told an interviewer, "It was the only work I didn't get back then."

The large Bergman collection of Cornell boxes must have been just as bewildering to the museum's curators, as it was then oddly housed alone in a small room on the ground floor between Greek antiquities and Mayan artifacts.

Only many years later would the collection be moved upstairs and woven into the narrative of 20th century modern art.

The strong structural and thematic similarities between the work of Jeff Wassmann and Joseph Cornell are often noted and readily apparent.

This is by no means coincidental and their origins are more than cursory.

Like Cornell, Wassmann came from an "old Methodist family."

Jeff Wassmann (born April 2, 1958) is an American artist, writer and theorist, currently living in Melbourne, Australia.

Wassmann studied postcolonial theory in the 1970s with Edward Said's mentor, friend and colleague, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, at Northwestern University's Institute for African Studies in Chicago, where he majored in political science and international studies.

As a part of his course-work at Northwestern, Wassmann studied painting with Ed Paschke and his then assistant Jeff Koons.

He later studied parliamentary politics in Wellington, New Zealand as a Richter Scholar before returning to Chicago, where he worked variously as an artist, writer and photojournalist.

He travelled to Timaru, New Zealand in 1975 as an exchange student, where he attended Timaru Boys' High School; he graduated from North Allegheny High School in Wexford, Pennsylvania the following year.

Several events in 1980 would influence Wassmann's decision to sideline a long-planned career in the diplomatic corps, embarking instead on photojournalism.

The most seminal was a visit to the exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer at the Art Institute of Chicago early in the year, a show that would have a profound impact on his vision as a photographer.

Soon after, while still a student at Northwestern, Wassmann answered the phone at the Daily Northwestern, where he was photo editor, to find Ted Kennedy's campaign manager on the line, asking him to join the Senator's presidential campaign in Illinois as official photographer.

Kennedy lost, and in November Ronald Reagan won the general election against incumbent Jimmy Carter, discouraging Wassmann further from his State Department aspirations.

As the year closed Wassmann was awarded the Grand Prix in Ilford's inaugural International Cibachrome Awards, finalizing his move into photography.

In the coming years Wassmann would discover the black and white photography of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, while coming under the increasing influence of the color imagery of William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore and Susan Meiselas.

During this period Wassmann's photography appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, Fortune and The Times (London).

In 1984 his work took the notice of Philip Jones Griffiths, the Welsh photographer and then president of Magnum Photos, who put forward Wassmann's portfolio for nomination to the esteemed French photo agency.

No photographers were accepted for membership to Magnum in that year, but it was on the encouragement of Jones Griffiths that Wassmann began actively writing articles to accompany his photographs, later attending the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

For a short time he shared a weekly page of street fashion in Women's Wear Daily with the New York photographer Bill Cunningham.

Cunningham took offense to the way WWD editors often portrayed the women he photographed, however, so he moved permanently to the New York Times and began his popular column.

In the closing years of the decade Wassmann dedicated himself to street photography, shooting over 10,000 unpublished Kodachrome slides in a body of work the artist titles Chicago in the Reagan Era.

In March 1989, he emigrated to Australia.

His first novel, The Buzzard, was released in October 2012.

Wassmann's art work incorporates assemblage, photography, web-based new media and aspects of culture jamming.

Wassmann was born in Mars, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four children.

His father was an engineer and worked in the steel industry.

His mother trained as a chemist and research librarian, later worked as a school librarian and was active in local politics.

He grew up in a family with a strong feminist legacy; his paternal grandmother ran the office of Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot; his maternal grandmother taught at the American University of Beirut Hospital.

At the age of seven Wassmann contracted rheumatic fever, was hospitalised and left with a heart murmur.

Two years later, his older brother (one of three siblings) developed juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, leaving him unable to walk unassisted for the next several years.

During these periods of confinement, the two acquired early mutual interests in photography, art and architecture that would define their work in later years.

His brother would become a well-known acoustical architect in New England.