Mark Steinmetz

Mark Christopher Steinmetz (born 1961) is an American photographer.

He makes black and white photographs "of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit".

He has mostly worked the same way with the same film, chemicals, and cameras since beginning in the mid 1980s.

Steinmetz's work is held in the following public collections:

He left that MFA program after one semester and in mid 1983, aged 22, moved to Los Angeles in search of the photographer Garry Winogrand, whom he befriended.

Steinmetz's work was shown in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1993/1994 and in solo exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2015, the High Museum of Art in 2018 and at Fotohof in Salzburg, Austria in 2019.

He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Steinmetz was born in New York City and raised in the Boston suburbs of Cambridge and Newton until he was 12.

He then moved to the midwest before, aged 21, he went to study photography at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

He moved to Athens, Georgia in 1999 and was still living and working there as of 2017.

Steinmetz makes photographs "of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit", and "in the midst of activity".

Most of his work has been made in the USA but also in Berlin, Paris, and Italy.

His books combine portraits (portrait-like but spontaneous) and candid photos of people, and also include animals and still life photos.

He finds many of his subjects whilst walking around but he has also spent time at Little League Baseball and summer camps.

Steinmetz predominantly works with black and white film, usually medium format, developed and printed in his own darkroom.