Christopher Phillip Verene is an American fine arts and documentary photographer born on October 29, 1969 in DeKalb, Illinois, and is the son of the philosopher Donald Verene. He spent his teens and twenties in Atlanta, Georgia and studied art at Georgia State University. Verene moved to Brooklyn in 1999. In 2000, he was included the Whitney Biennial with his 1998 series Camera Club and the performance installation piece, The Self-Esteem Salon. 
He is most recognized for his work ‘Family’ a project which he began at aged 16 as a simple pastime, which has transformed into a 23 year ongoing project. Three generations of his family still live in Galesburg and the family, is friends and the city are the subjects of the body of work. Verene began working with a medium format camera and started taking pictures of his family and friends within the small town of Galesburg. While having many diverse interests in music, film, and escape magic, the subject of his photographic career eventually became centered on the town of Galesburg and various events that take place within it. In 1998, The New York Times observed: “… anthropological portraits, like Chris Verene’s of a cousin at her wedding banquet in Illinois… Such portraits tell us less about individual people than about the worlds they inhabit, which is perhaps the main truth of most portraits.” 
The works on the town of Galesburg, shows everyday life ans the struggling families trying to carry on family traditions and a past way of life in the declining American Midwest. All of Verene’s images are unstaged documentary color photography, all though they may appear to look staged at some points. With its Arbusian style his work is largely appreciated for its honesty, intense color, and composition.
In a review of Verene’s Galesburg portraits shown at Postmasters Gallery in 2010, Cora Fisher writes in The Brooklyn Rail: “At no point in their stories of separation, divorce, remarriage, and birth across generational ties, class differences, and economic changes do they seem any less than Verene’s co-authors in the construction of their narrative.”
What I like about these images so much of Chris’s is that he had given these images context and given the images real meaning and by having ma small description of why the image was taken it gives the audience so understand of the meaning behind the image. As many photographers take images they are very symbolic and meaningful to them but to the on looking eye it has no real meaning or significance. So this is a technique that I want to incorporate into my work.