about | a little about me
Chris Enos was born, raised and educated in California. This may account for her peculiar sense of humor and bizarre outlook on life. Acutely observant, she watched the beautiful farmlands and landscape of Southern California become covered with freeways, shopping malls and housing developments. Eventually she had an observation problem because of all the smog, and moved to the northern part of the state.
In college, she had a hard time finding something that she could do with her life that would not contribute to this materialistic madness. Then, alas, ART saved another life!
She received a BA degree in sculpture from San Francisco State and a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970. She put herself through school working as a waitress and lived the hippie life in the Haight Ashbury and Marin County. The first photographs she made were during this time and the nude was her vehicle for expressing the freedom of the time.
After her move to the east coast, her focus became more documentary, concentrating on nature and its struggle to survive the urban environment. From this time on, her work always served as a metaphor for something going on in her life as well as documenting the world around her. The most highly published were her plant life and flower series. Both looking at the edge between beauty and decay and reaching the graying stages of her life.
In 1976, Chris founded the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) in Boston to provide a venue for fine art and documentary photographers to meet, promote, and display their work, filling a critical gap in the Boston arts scene. She served as director of the PRC from 1976 to 1981.
After many years in the urban environment, Chris moved to beautiful Plum Island, about an hour north of Boston, where she would go for daily walks on the beach with her two dogs. In 2004, after retiring from 30 years teaching photography, Enos moved to Taos, NM. In 2007 she settled in Santa Fe, where she plans to stay and just concentrate on making new work and ridding herself of the last 40 years of work.
To sum it up, Chris believes that the artist is a particularly sensitive person that observes and digests the human condition. Sometimes it is very beautiful and sometimes it makes you sick. Most of the time it is somewhere in-between.