Brian Kosoff

This native New Yorker, born 1957, first became interested in art through sculpture, then found his way to photography, which ultimately became his life’s work. His earliest work, produced in his teens, was primarily focused on urban landscape. Many indications of his eventual photographic style were evident then, however landscape photography would have to wait more than twenty years before he would pursue it seriously.

In his last year of high school, Kosoff worked as an intern assisting several editorials and advertising photographers. This experience would have a lasting impact on his life in that it made it clear to him that photography was his calling, but it would also send him down the path of commercial work and setting aside his personal work. While enrolled as a photography major at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, Kosoff maintained an active career freelancing as a photographic assistant. His impatience and ambition to start his professional career would get the better of him and he left SVA in his second year to focus on assisting accomplished photographers. He felt this to be a better means to gain experience and rapidly expand his photographic knowledge.

While still in his late teens he had his first solo gallery exhibition in NYC.  His show was featured in the coveted NY Times “short list” of recommended shows, and in which the Times described Kosoff as a “formalist”, a term he had not been familiar with at the time but turned out to be an apt description of his work today. During this time, and much to his own surprise, Kosoff was getting steady editorial assignments, by age twenty-one had a few national magazine cover assignments to his credit, a photo studio on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and a growing client list which would ultimately include many of the Fortune 500.

After two decades passed of producing photographs solely for advertising agencies and magazines, Kosoff realized that he had come to a point where he had long ceased doing photography for the pure pleasure of it. This was not the original intent of Kosoff as a young man who ventured out on the stormiest of days to take dramatic landscape photographs and then spent the entire night printing them in his darkroom. A return to his original photographic dream as an artist was long overdue. So in 1998 Kosoff packed his camera bags and headed west to photograph the natural landscape. The process and exploration of new environments was exciting and enlightening, and it also required that he master new skills to adapt to an environment more capricious and less controllable than that found in his studio. But he was immediately hooked.

Kosoff continued juggling landscape trips while maintaining his NYC studio for a few years but by the end of 2002, and after acquiring representation with several galleries, he closed his Manhattan studio and decided to pursue his personal photography full time.

His landscape work reflects his many years of professional training and his collaborations with talented art directors and designers from whom he learned much about design and composition. His often centrically composed compositions also reflect an understanding of human vision, where the object of our observation is centered in our visual field and in focus, as well as his years producing his commercial still life images which often required a centered subject in a minimal or even non-existent environment. Kosoff’s minimalist style is rooted in the idea that if an element does not add to the content of an image then it too often detracts from it.

The feeling of light often shown in his work is reminiscent of his earliest memories, when as a child he would awaken well before his family and sit in the backyard during sunrise, listen to the birds and watch the changing light as the sun rose. His love of early morning light and the serenity of those early memories is evident in much of his work. But the influence of his commercial experience in how Kosoff often uses light to add depth and dimension to the elements within his compositions is evident in his landscape work as well. While photography is inherently a two-dimensional media, proper lighting can create the perception of a third dimension. By using long time exposures, one can also add the fourth dimension to an image, time, as evidenced by Kosoff’s recent series of Night images.

Mr. Kosoff has been exhibited in dozens of exhibitions across America, his commercial work earned him many national awards, and his photography has appeared in countless publications.

Brian Kosoff Official Website