Bio
Christine Welch (Lancaster, PA) is a fine art photographer whose work is in the permanent collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The American University Corcoran Legacy Collection, Haverford College, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, The Pennsylvania Convention Center as well as several private collections. Her work has been reviewed in national publications including The Photo Review, The New Art Examiner and the Washington Post. She has received numerous awards including the Florence Whistler Fish Award for Photography in 2010.
A monograph of her images, Commonplace, (afterword by John Stilgoe, Harvard University) was published in 2004 as part of The Road and American Culture Series by the Center for American Places (distributed by University of Chicago Press). Gregory Conniff, author of Common Ground, said of her work, “...an excellent look at public places of daily life. Many photographers have addressed this subject, but few with her feeling for color, and none with her empathy for the ways these places struggle to get it right.”
Born in WIlliamsport and raised in Lancaster, PA, she often takes the vernacular culture and landscape of central Pennsylvania as her subject. Her series, The Susquehanna Trail: Road of Never-Ending Delight, investigates that contemporary landscape and refers to a 1929 Lycoming County guidebook which promoted tourism from Washington D.C. to Niagara Falls. Welch, by lavishing her focus on the places we pass through on the way to somewhere else, asks us to pay attention and learn what they may reveal.
Her most recent work, Another Season of Prickly Dread, began in 2016, continued through the pandemic and sporadically into the present. In this work, she creates images which describe an itchy sense of anxiety coupled with subtle nods to the small insults of aging. By moving away from the constraints of a particular genre she detaches our experience of unease from place and makes it disquietingly pervasive.
Welch earned a BA from Franklin & Marshall College, an MFA in Photography from the University of Delaware and is a Professor, Emeritus, founder and past Chair of the Photography Department at the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Lancaster, PA. She also taught at Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA), The University of Delaware (Newark DE) and Lebanon Valley College (Lebanon, PA).