Artist Biography

John Charles Dean is originally from Louisiana but has lived in Atlanta Georgia since 1996. He has both a BFA in art photography / art history, from the University of Arizona in Tucson and an MFA in art photography from Tyler School of Art of Temple University in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. In the mid 1970's he studied contemporary art at Antioch College West in San Francisco. In the late 1970's and early 1980’s John studied photography with the internationally recognized artists, Todd Walker, William Larson, Larry Fink, and Esther Parada. In Arizona, he also took classes with the great American artists, W. Eugene Smith and James Turrell.

John’s work is represented in the collections of The Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, the Museum Of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Yale University rare prints collection, the Kling architectural photography collection Philadelphia, the San Francisco Camerawork artist's book collection, Clarence John Laughlin’s personal collection, and the Greenberg Traurig and Bunnen Collections in Atlanta.

Four limited edition portfolios are available of John's photography that describe various aspects of architecture, landscape, and especially the interaction of the constructed landscape with the pre-humanized landscape. His last two series, “Geological Time” pictures geological formations photographed in the South-Eastern US, by isolating them from their original contexts with black backgrounds, almost as if they were photographed in the studio. He uses their shapes and physical interrelationships as a metaphor for plate tectonics, geological time, and the formation of continents over millennia. This metaphor especially relates to the Appalachian mountain range system which once connected North America with North Africa and Northern Europe at the time of the “super continent” 340 million years ago, called Pangea by geologists.

The series Cool Clear Hydrosphere, describes in still life form, the mystery of the most precious and powerful life force on the planet, water, the element that makes all terrestrial life and the landscape possible. During the global pandemic period of 2021-22, John created temporary physical sculptures of folded papers and photographed them as linear panoramas by carefully lighting them in the studio. Each carbon pigment inkjet print represents a different aspect of a landscape through memories of hikes and camping locations within North Georgia and North Virginia wilderness areas . These series as in his previous works, The Buford Highway Glyphs, Buildings in Motion, and Time Maps, blend the mediums of still life and landscape photography into a hybrid form of crafted expression.