b. 1963, Montreal

Miles Coolidge was born in 1963 in Montreal. He received a B.A. from Harvard University in 1986 and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1992. He then attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany, where he studied under the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Garages (1992), his first work following graduate school, consisted of large-scale photographs of elevator interiors that recalled the Bechers' penchant for typological categorization. He continued to investigate functional social spaces in the series Safetyville (1994), in which he photographed a one-third scale model of an American town built in 1984 to educate children about traffic safety. In the Central Valley series (1998), the artist reduced panoramic California landscape photographs to thin strips ten inches high and ten feet long. For Ancient History (2001), he crafted a grid of 160 ink-jet prints of old postcards of Native American burial mounds, juxtaposing these images with panoramic views of golf courses built upon such mounds in Louisiana and Alabama. Recent projects include Drawbridges (2003), a suite of nine photographs of South Florida drawbridges.

Coolidge has had solo exhibitions at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (1992), Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (1994), and Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe (2001), among others. He has also appeared in many group shows, including Stills: Emerging Photography in the 1990s at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1997), Pop Surrealism at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut (1998), Picturing Modernity at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1998), Supermodel at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams (2000), Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003), Austrian Triennial on Photography in Graz (2003), and Only Skin Deep at the International Center of Photography in New York (2003). In addition, he has received grants from DAAD (1993�94) and the City of Los Angeles (1998�99). He lives and works in Los Angeles.