Ben Crowley

Originally from Athens, Georgia, and later, Oak Ridge, North Carolina, Ben began his photographic journey after his grandmother gave him a camera at age 9 or 10. Coming from a family of artists, she thought photography would be a good introduction. He has never really stopped since then. He took photography classes in college but was an Anthropology and Archaeology major, and his first serious photographic endeavors were actually being the designated photographic documentarian on archaeological digs, forensic photography, and doing aerial photography for site surveys.

His photography took a much more serious turn however when the planes hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. He joined the U.S. Army the next day and over the next 5 years had the opportunity to document the war from the perspective of a combat soldier fighting on the front lines, first from the battlefield, and later from the hospital.

Severely wounded in 2005, Ben spent the next 14 months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and, from a wheelchair, documented the treatment and recovery of more than 20 different service members, mostly amputees as he is a leg amputee himself. Thus far in life this remains his most rewarding photographic experience, albeit one that for privacy reasons of the subjects he is unable to show publicly.

His photographic work these days combines his background in anthropology and archaeology with the love of landscape and nature, and this combines to become an interest in the passing of generations and our engagement with the changing economic, technological and natural environments as generations pass and are born, especially in how the changes in these things affect the experience of people.

Artistically his biggest focus is exploring the degree that the changes in generations and technology affect the ability of each generation to identify with the last or the next; Ben’s concern being that technological and economic change is increasing in speed enough that generations are losing the ability to identify with each other.

His primary photographic focus is documentary photography of the economic and social changes that have happened in the southeastern part of the US in the last 30 years. His work varies from strictly documentary style to work that borders the fence with fine art but he stands firm in the documentary camp.

Ben lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife, daughter, and 3 dogs. In addition to photography, he is also a woodworker and a woodcarver. His next artistic mission is to combine woodcarving and photography to actually do relief carvings of human and dog portraits, with the idea being to take portraits of people or their dogs and take the image and use it to produce a low relief carving of the image itself.