Renee Harbers is a photographer and researcher whose practice combines photography with art-historical study. Her work examines inherited instructions for seeing: the conventions through which bodies, objects and landscapes are made legible. She works with self-portraiture, staged narrative and humor, and is as interested in where the camera stands as in what it shows.
Her series Trixie and the Ranch, a fictional narrative in forty-six photographs, is a tongue-in-cheek story about the lengths people go to belong and, more seriously, about the loneliness behind that wish. David Campany curated its 2024 exhibition at The Blue Door Gallery in Livingston, Montana, which was accompanied by a photobook she designed and produced. Her project The Disappearing Woman turns the camera on her own aging, and on a culture that looks past women as they grow older.
The same questions run through her research. Harbers holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford and an MSt in the History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of Oxford, where she wrote on the photographic conventions that shape the visual representation of aging women. She is completing a second Oxford MSt in Literature and Arts, with current research on British landscape and the picturesque.
In 2007, she founded the Harbers Family Foundation and, in 2014, Harbers Studios. Through them, she has produced nearly ninety short documentaries for nonprofits, including the National Geographic Society and Conservation International. She is Executive Vice President of the International Center of Photography and a member of the National Gallery of Art’s Photography Initiative. She divides her time between New York, Montana and Oxford.