Joy Bush is a photographer based in Connecticut. She grew up near New York City and as a child she loved family excursions to NYC museums and theater productions. After graduating from college she discovered the magic of photography, and bought herself a Pentax Spotmatic camera. Eventually employed as a university photographer, she documented life on college campuses while developing personal bodies of work.
Her photography practice involves gathering evidence: weaving autobiography with fiction. Through her personal wandering, many series have emerged, yet the one overall thread of her trajectory is paying attention to easily overlooked, obscure circumstances that have occurred prior to her arrival. For decades she has witnessed, embraced, and communicated joy, solitude, peace, disruption, abstraction, and irony through the photographic image.
Bush’s work was featured in UNBEATABLE WOMEN at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, CT (2022) as well as solo shows A HOLY LAND IN RUINS at City Gallery (2024) and the Mattuck Museum, CT (2013), WAITING (2023) and HOME VIEWS: PLACES IN NEVER LIVED (2021) at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts. Her photographs have appeared in Fraction Magazine, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Connecticut Review, and many other publications. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibits nationally including the International Center for Photography (NYC), Mattatuck Museum (CT), Lyman Allyn Art Museum (CT), Five Points Art Gallery (CT), Griffin Museum of Photography (MA), Copley Society (Boston, MA), Garrison Art Center (NY), and Umbrella Arts (NYC). Bush is represented in the permanent collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Mattatuck Museum, Montefiore Hospital (Bronx, NY), the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Yale Medical Group Art Place, and private collections.
All images on this site are copyrighted by Joy Bush and may not be used
without written permission of Joy Bush.
Joy Bush is a photographer based in Hamden, CT. She grew up near New York City and as a child loved family excursions to NYC museums, theater productions, dance performances, and music concerts. The trips always ended with a great dessert or a delicious meal at the now extinct Stage Delicatessen. Joy discovered photography soon after graduating from college and eventually landed a job as a university photographer. She continued to develop her fine art photography while doing documentary work.
Known for her existential quirkiness, Joy's photography explores topics as simple as the color red to more complex issues that raise questions about social class, where we live, and how we function in the world. Without necessarily photographing people, she address the things that we collect in life as well as things that we build. Her daily walks provide the underpinning of her work. She says:
“My walks are daily mediations, a time to pay attention to the things that speak to me, as well as to make a connection to my surroundings. There always seems to be something that deserves to be seen, that may have gone unnoticed, that feels important to record. My photographs mark it in time, create its story, or make up a new story. Almost intuitively the photographs become the answer to questions that I think about, to issues that concern me, and very often, I am delighted by a surprise discovery.”
Joy’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibits nationally and internationally galleries at Umbrella Arts (NYC), Copley Society (Boston, MA), Carriage Barn (New Canaan, CT), Mattatuck Museum (Waterbury, CT), Garrison Art Center (NY), Drawing Rooms (NJ), Charter Oak Cultural Center (Hartford, CT), DaSilva Gallery (New Haven, CT), Kehler Liddell Gallery (New Haven, CT), City Gallery (New Haven, CT), Artspace (New Haven, CT). Her work was selected for Solos 2015 show at the Westport Arts Center and at Central Booking in New York City, and for HOME VIEWS at the Griffin Museum of Photography (2021). Her photographs have appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Connecticut Review, and many other publications.
She is represented in the permanent collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Mattatuck Museum (Waterbury, CT), Monetfiore Hopsital (Bronx, NY), the Baseball Hall of Fame (Cooperstown, NY), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Cleveland, OH), Yale Medical Group Art Place (New Haven, CT), and many private collections. She is a member of City Gallery (New Haven, CT).
All images on this site are copyrighted by Joy Bush and may not be used
without written permission of Joy Bush.
All images on this site are copyrighted by Joy Bush and may not be used
without written permission of Joy Bush.