The Hereditary Estate - Hardcover

by Daniel Coburn (Photographer), Karen Irvine (Text by (Art/Photo Books)), Kirsten Pai Buick (Text by (Art/Photo Books))

The Hereditary Estate functions as a ten-year retrospective and as a conceptual work of art. Daniel Coburn's work investigates the family photo album employed as the visual infrastructure for the flawed ideology of the American Dream. Frustrated by the lack of images that document the true and sometimes troubling nature of his own familial history, the photographer set out to create a new archive, a potent supplement to the broken family album that exists in many families.

Using photographs made over the last decade and altered, amateur photographs, he weaves a family narrative that is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.

Author Biography

Daniel W. Coburn lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the Chelsea Museum of Art, New York.
Coburn's prints are held in collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the Mulvane Museum of Art, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, and the Mariana Kistler-Beach Museum of Art.
He has been invited as a guest lecturer at national and international photography events including the International Festival of Photography in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and the Helsinki Photo-Media Conference. Coburn received his BFA with an emphasis in photography from Washburn University. He received his MFA with distinction from the University of New Mexico in 2013. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Photo Media at the University of Kansas.

Karen Irvine is curator and associate director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College Chicago

Kirsten Pai Buick, Ph.D., is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM). She was formerly a lecturer at the Art Institute of Chigaco (IL).