Location: Vallejo, CA
Medium: Photography, artist books
Website: andresgonzalezphoto.com
Andres Gonzalez is a visual artist, photographer, and educator based in Vallejo, California. He received a BA from Pomona College and an MA in Visual Communications from Ohio University in 2004. He’s been a Fulbright Fellow (Istanbul) and a contributor to the New Yorker, Smithsonian, and the New York Times. His awards include a Light Work Artist Residency, a Pulitzer Center Grant, a New York Photo Award, the Canon Italia Young Photographer’s Prize (2009), and recognition from the Magenta Foundation and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. He was selected as one of PDN’s 30 photographers to watch.
He is the life partner of photographer CarolynDrake — with whom he lives in Vallejo and has collaborated on their most recent book, I’ll Let You Be In My Dreams If I Can Be In Yours (MACK, 2024). He has published three books: Some(W)Here (self-published, 2012); American Origami (Fw:Books, 2019), which won the Light Work Photo Book Award, was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Book Awards, and was named one of the best photo books of 2019 by TIME Magazine, The Guardian, and Photo-Eye; and the MACK collaboration with Drake (2024).
Gonzalez works in photography and artist books, synthesizing in-depth research with the poetics of photography — seeking truths behind the fictional and mythic aspects of American history, and attending to places and people that often remain overlooked. His defining project, American Origami, grew from six years of research into the epidemic of mass shootings at American schools. Moving between the poetic and the forensic, he documented the long aftermath of these events: the scar tissue that grows around a campus after the memorials fade, the forensic documents and memorial ephemera that accumulate and disappear, the ways communities carry and suppress collective trauma. The book’s accordion-fold format — opening and revealing its contents in layers — was designed to mirror this archaeology of image, text, archive, and history. His collaborative work with Carolyn Drake, made across five years traversing the US-Mexico border, brings two distinct photographic perspectives into intimate dialogue.
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