David Benjamin Sherry

The stand-alone, recognizable images of Los Angeles-based photographer David Benjamin Sherry depict landscapes and topographic details in highly stylized and radiant monochromatic compositions. A graduate of Yale’s MFA program, Sherry works primarily with analog film and printing technology, and so he totes medium and large-scale film cameras on treks into the deserts and national parks of the American West. The artist's classic arrangements of mountainscapes, lakes, and forests evoke the majesty of Ansel Adam’s timeless images, yet Sherry’s particular twist on the genre of landscape photography involves a darkroom process wherein he drastically manipulates filmic color, so as to achieve chromatic extremes—acid greens, azure blues, velvet purples. Meanwhile, Sherry's zoomed-in studies of arid topography, which border on abstraction, find art-historical precedent in both Edward Weston’s photographic close-ups of the Californian desert, as well as Georgia O’Keefe’s earthy, romantic depictions of America's Southwestern landscape.

Notably, Sherry’s work was included in MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” survey of 2010. Additionally, Sherry has exhibited at the Aspen Art Museum, the Garage Museum in Moscow, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and White Columns in New York, among others.