Jeff Barnett-Winsby
RISD MFA ’06 [Photography]
Working in a straightforward style and avoiding digital effects and manipulation, Jeff Barnett-Winsby creates social documentary photographs that allow the subjects to speak for themselves. For At First Meeting, a series of portraits striking for the balanced intensity of subject and setting, he used Craigslist online forums to recruit strangers to photograph in their homes; Safe Harbor, a group of stark prison inmate portraits, was intended not as a condemnation of the American penal system, he explains, but as a catalyst for discussion about the meaning of punishment in our culture. Barnett-Winsby’s commercial and fine art work has been published in V, Domino and other magazines. He has exhibited extensively in New England and his native Kansas.