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Biography

Photographer Nan Brown attended the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s. She has studied with Ansel Adams, Judy Dater, Mark Citret, and John Sexton. After moving to northeast California in 1975, Nan pursued a 15-year career in studio photography. In 1988 she began teaching photography at Feather River College. From 1980 to 1997, Brown exhibited her fine art photography throughout northern California. In 2007, she returned to showing after a ten-year hiatus with exhibitions at Viewpoint Gallery in Sacramento, Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, and Rayco Photo Center in San Francisco.

Artist Statement

I wanted to photograph the everyday, the discarded, the taken for granted. Those things, photographed in a non-dramatic manner, can prompt an inner event belonging to each viewer alone. I believe in beauty. It’s what makes art irresistible. Classic black-and-white technique is my means to that end. Sometimes the result is the irony of the commonplace made beautiful.

I have long loved trailers as objects. They are often alone in a landscape, ironic metal comments. Billboard-like and wonderfully two-dimensional, their facades feature subtly beautiful tones and textures. I trap the squares and rectangles of windows within the squares and rectangles of trailers within the square camera format. The repetition of form causes people to look closely at each trailer for variation. Portrait-like, individual personalities are revealed.

These are architectural images. Through them I can examine human themes without photographing actual people. Older trailers, with their sturdy and ingenious designs, at once suggest aspiration and inevitability. Their countenance and location always imply histories. It is a privilege to photograph a home and its environs. There is a particular license expressed in the treatment of trailer exteriors where residents frequently put a unique stamp on something mass-produced and make ample creative use of their small canvas. Making the best of things or the worst of things; the trailer images give testimony to these experiences that are not the province of any given social class or group.