Chris Bickford is a photographer headquartered on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  His work has been featured in National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Outside Magazine, Vision Magazine, Surfing Magazine, and various other regional, national, and international publications.

 

Chris has been a creative explorer all of his life.  His interests and pursuits have ranged from music and the visual arts to cultural anthropology and world travel.   He was born in Norfolk, Virginia; graduated Cum Laude from Episcopal High School in Alexandria; and was an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia.

 

After over a decade of wandering the country playing music, a stint at graduate school, and a few trips to Europe and Latin America, Chris ended up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where he eked out a meager living playing songs in beach bars until, one winter, he borrowed his father’s old Nikon FM2 camera and began taking photographs of the wild and unpredictable landscape of the Outer Banks.  Suddenly things got a lot clearer.

 

Since then Chris has built a profitable photography business which has afforded him time and money to pursue personal projects, and those projects have begun to garner him attention in the photographic world at large.   Aside from After the Storm, Chris is also at work on a long-term project on the ancient rites of Carnival and their modern expressions around the world.   So far he has traveled to Venice, Italy; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.   He is also nearing completion of a project called In the Night, which is a comic-book-noir-style treatment of the tragically hip and architecturally claustrophobic world of Lower East Manhattan and Brooklyn.  His stories have been published in China, South Africa, Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States.  He has exhibited in New York, California, Washington DC, and North Carolina, and his work has been featured at a number of prestigious photography festivals.   In addition he spent the spring and summer of 2010 on assignment for the New York Times covering the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and has also worked for NPR, National Geographic Traveler, and a variety of other publications and organizations.

 

Chris is always open for assignments, workshops, exhibitions, speaking engagements, or just some good intellectual banter and a cold beverage.   He’s easy enough to reach, either through this website, his home website, Facebook…whatever.  Or you can just come down to the OBX and ask around.