Chris Lowell

31 Days #64, 2011

Chris Lowell Biography Chris Lowell investigates themes of nostalgia, utopia and dystopia, and autobiography in his work, shooting on film and using traditional printing practices to convey the most 'honest' interpretation of his photographs. Beginning in street photography in 2005—inspired by Robert Frank, Elliott Erwitt, Walker Evans, and Henri Cartier-Bresson—Lowell later turned the camera inward, drawing on the early work of Robert Mapplethorpe and the Southern portraits of Sally Mann. Trading a Leica for a medium-format Hasselblad, Chris Lowell began photographing his 'memories,' producing images that feel at once ethereal and grounded, part of this world and too good to be true. The photographs of Chris Lowell carry the viewer into a poetic register while keeping their feet planted in the real one. Chris Lowell studied photography at the University of Southern California and at the New School for Design in New York. His practice remains rooted in analog process, with all prints produced as gelatin-silver editions using traditional darkroom methods. Lowell recently published his first monograph, Thirty-One Days (Fall Line Press, 2026), a memoir of youth set in his family's home on the shores of Lake Rabun, Georgia. During his final month in and around that childhood home, Chris Lowell photographs a distinct portrait of the American South—a landscape as true as it is mythical. In Lowell's interpretation, singular moments are made infinite: bodies leap off roofs and fall from trees, suspended in permanent flight, while the smoke of a cigarette and the sparks of a firecracker burn forever. The intentional absence of contextual clues frees the black-and-white imagery from any particular moment in time, and the result is an Edenic collection—simultaneously fleeting and everlasting, tactile and ethereal. Communicated through 68 spot-varnished duotone plates, Thirty-One Days invites us to experience 'a single month for most, but a lifetime for those of us who are butterflies.' His photographs have also been featured in Interview Magazine, Glamour, and Vanity Fair. The work of Chris Lowell is held in notable private collections, including the Sovereign Collection and the Elton John Collection, among others. He has exhibited throughout the United States, with presentations at Photo LA and the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, where his previous shows include The Dreamers. Jackson Fine Art presented Lowell in the solo exhibition 31 Days (2014) which premiered many of the images seen in the monograph Thirty-One Days released in 2026.