John Neff

The Renaissance Society presents a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist John Neff. The exhibition includes a new body of photographs made from digital cameras Neff built by outfitting desktop scanners with bellows and lenses taken from antique cameras. Made without shutters or viewfinders, the cameras capture images using a slow-moving linear scanning array, rather than a full-field sensor. Over the course of 18 months, Neff used the scanner cameras to photograph his immediate environment, his long-exposure photographic process resulting in mysterious and tonally rich images that have the look and feel of earlier moments in the medium’s history.

This will be Neff’s first solo museum exhibition. His previous exhibitions featured multi-layered installations constructed from sculptural, photographic, mechanical and textual elements.

This exhibition is generously funded by Daniel S. Berger, MD; Matti Bunzl and Billy Vaughn. The exhibition’s education program is supported by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.