Jeff Liao grew up in Taiwan and moved to Canada to
attend high school. He relocated to his current home of New York City to complete
his undergraduate degree at Pratt and receive his MFA at the School of Visual
Arts. Liao is well-known for his large-scale panoramic photos that capture
magnificent details of the urban and social environment of New York City.
Liao's first major and best known project is his Habitat 7 series, which won the first ever New York Times Magazine "Capture the Times" photography contest in 2005. In this project, Liao shot with a large format camera to create large-scale, color panoramic images of the ethnic communities that have grown around the IRT 7 train in Queens, New York. Using multiple exposures created in the same location and taken over the course of several hours, Liao constructed a compelling project that transcends the limits of documentary photography. This series reveals Liao's intensely personal journey through the borough of Queens, evident in the diverse range of subjectivities throughout his photographs. The Queens Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of Habitat 7 for six months during the spring and summer of 2006. Examples from Habitat 7 are included in the collection of the George Eastman House, the Harvard Business School, and the Getty Museum. Nazraeli Press published a large scale monograph with text by Anne Tucker in the fall of 2006, and they plan to publish a second monograph on Liao's Depth of Fields stadium project this year. The series documents the evolution of an ordinary parking lot in Queens into Citi Field, the new home of the Mets.
In 2009, The Bronx Museum of the Arts commissioned Liao for a major project entitled Intersections: Grand Concourse, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Grand Concourse. Most recently, Liao exhibited alongside Catherine Opie and Soo Kim at the Getty Museum in the group exhibition, Urban Panoramas, displaying selected works from his Habitat 7 series.
Liao's first major and best known project is his Habitat 7 series, which won the first ever New York Times Magazine "Capture the Times" photography contest in 2005. In this project, Liao shot with a large format camera to create large-scale, color panoramic images of the ethnic communities that have grown around the IRT 7 train in Queens, New York. Using multiple exposures created in the same location and taken over the course of several hours, Liao constructed a compelling project that transcends the limits of documentary photography. This series reveals Liao's intensely personal journey through the borough of Queens, evident in the diverse range of subjectivities throughout his photographs. The Queens Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of Habitat 7 for six months during the spring and summer of 2006. Examples from Habitat 7 are included in the collection of the George Eastman House, the Harvard Business School, and the Getty Museum. Nazraeli Press published a large scale monograph with text by Anne Tucker in the fall of 2006, and they plan to publish a second monograph on Liao's Depth of Fields stadium project this year. The series documents the evolution of an ordinary parking lot in Queens into Citi Field, the new home of the Mets.
In 2009, The Bronx Museum of the Arts commissioned Liao for a major project entitled Intersections: Grand Concourse, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Grand Concourse. Most recently, Liao exhibited alongside Catherine Opie and Soo Kim at the Getty Museum in the group exhibition, Urban Panoramas, displaying selected works from his Habitat 7 series.
Survey [view
images]
Depth of Fields 2007-2008 (series in progress) [view
images]
Habitat 7 2004-2005 [view
images]