Steve Harp is a teacher/artist, who works in creating and sequencing images, and presenting them in the form of photographs, videos, and artist's books. In his artwork, he draws connections between the visual world and the world of ideas as presented in literary, historical, philosophical, and psychoanalytic texts. He approaches photography as a detective process revolving around considerations of history, place, ephemerality, transience, and liminality. He considers his work as an investigation and an attempt to depict or suggest through photography, what's not there, those things that, in the words of Walter Benjamin, "flash up at the instant they can be recognized."
Harp is an Associate Professor of Photography and Media Art in the Department of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University, where he teaches both studio classes and seminars on photography, contemporary art, cultural studies, and literature. He holds a BFA in Film, an MA in Communication Studies/Film Production, and an MFA in Photography. His work, which has been exhibited and published nationally, often deals with questions of place, history, and travel. He has photographed in and done photographic projects on places as disparate as Greenland, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Quebec, Russia, Poland, Albania, Budapest, Florida, and the American Midwest. Over the past decade, he has been working primarily in the form of the photographic artist's book.
He is currently working on a series of collaborative projects with the umbrella title "Geographies of the Holocaust," as well as a series of psychoanalytically inspired personal essays.