[ B I O G R A P H Y ]

Brian Kosoff is a Brooklyn boy who currently resides in Portland Oregon. He studied photography and sculpture at the School of Visual Arts in New York City but left before graduating to pursue professional experience by assisting New York magazine and advertising photographers. It was during this period that he began accepting assignments from magazines. He got his first national magazine cover assignment for Saturday Review magazine was at age 20. A year later he opened his first photo studio in New York City. Over the next 23 years he completed thousands of advertising and editorial assignments, mostly still life images and garnering more than three dozen national awards for his efforts. He taught briefly at School of Visual Arts and the Germain School of Photography, but he’s proudest of the accomplishments of the assistants who trained under him, many who have gone on to successful careers as photographers.

Late in his commercial career he began to embrace more personal photography, like the images he produced as a teen. At the urging of his wife Jayni, he showed his personal work to a local gallery who then offered to show his work. His exhibition did exceedingly well, selling nearly all the prints and for some images multiple prints. It encouraged him to show his work to galleries in Manhattan. Within a week he acquired gallery representation. At the end of 2002 he decided that he closed his Manhattan photo studio to pursue his personal photography exclusively.

Early in this second career his work consisted of B&W landscape images. Over time he found his vision, influenced by his professional experience, adapting his still life background to landscape photography. For a boy, born and raised in New York City, it was intoxicating to travel to the vast open spaces of the American West and foreign countries in the pursuit of a new landscape that was just around the next turn.

His early work was solely B&W film capture and silver gelatin prints but as digital capture and digital printing improved, he started to produce color images as well. The demand for large prints has meant that most of his prints today are produced on one of his two 44” printers, one dedicated to B&W using archival carbon pigments and the other using Epson Ultrachrome color inks. He is currently preparing to produce PT/PD prints as well.

He won’t deny himself the guilty pleasure of photographing a well-known scene, so long as he can bring something new to it. But his preference, and joy, is to photograph the scene that is often overlooked, to find unexpected beauty. His work has appeared in many publications and more than fifty solo and group exhibitions.