Artist Biosketch
Robert Birnbaum is a photographer residing in Cambridge Massachusetts. His photography practice dates to his late teens when he attended Project Inc. photography collective, the Orsen Welles Film School, and the New England School of Photography (NESOP). Subsequently he embarked on a four-decade academic career as a physician scientist and educator clinically specializing in psychiatry and engaging in molecular research studying brain plasticity. Pursuits that deeply ingrained a fascination with psychic processes and adaptation. Now in semi-retirement he has turned his passions back to photographic image making and is attending the Atelier program at the Griffin Museum of Photography and the one-year intensive certificate program on ‘Writing and the Photographic Image’ at the International Center of Photography (ICP). He maintains affiliate faculty positions with the Meditation Research Program at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital and the Visual Arts in Healthcare Program at Brigham & Women’s Hospital.
His work explores the schism between inner felt experience and external reality; discord existing between the sentient and the corporeal world. His images intend to evoke wonder created by the inexorable coupling of chaos and order, emotion, and physicality. His images leverage the camera’s dynamism bringing forth the transformation of perceptions into metaphors of trauma and resilience.