Clay Patrick McBride
Clay Patrick McBride is known for his bold portraiture that celebrates his subjects through empowerment, humor, honesty, and grit; he has an ability to connect with his subjects in a way that is personal, intense, and collaborative in nature. His philosophy of image-making fuses experimentation with classical training in painting and art history, resulting in an iconic visual language that creates a conversation between the old and the new world. McBride began his visual training in the South of France in his late teens and early twenties before moving to NYC to study at the School of Visual Arts for photography. McBride shifted his focus to photography after being inspired by the notorious CBGB music club and the revolutionary music and visuals emerging from that scene in the Gen X 90’s. His deep interest in connecting with and understanding the world around him is what drives McBride to keep exploring new processes, techniques, and to examine the interplay between process and the portrait, time and space. A recent fascination for McBride has been collodion wet plate photography – where he brings his mobile darkroom set up to skate parks and photographs strangers. Always trying new approaches to the image, he explores chemigrams and other alternative processes, as well as film and music videos. One of his most recent film productions is The Incredible Exploding Boy, which explores the complex and often challenging relationship between fathers and sons, mental illness, and addiction through an autobiographical lens. Currently, he is a senior lecturer at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he mentors the next generation of visual artists, living between Rochester, NY, and NYC with his wife, Sarah Keane, and Italian mastiff Judy.
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