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Wayne Sorce | American, 1946-2015

Wayne Sorce was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1946. He received both an B.F.A and an M.F.A from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969 and 1971. 

Sorce worked as a liturgical artist, until 1966, where he began taking color photographs of people and their homes. He was later employed as a freelance reportage photographer, specializing in photographic essays, and as a professor, teaching photography at Columbia College and the Art Institute of Chicago. After Chicago, he moved to New York and the Philippines to continue working with photography. 

In 1972, Sorce had a solo show at The Art Institute of Chicago. His photographs have also been exhibited at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

“For me, photography is very important in that it exists because of everything else. I hope this explanation is enough because I think it would be a mistake to write words to be read about that which I only intended to be viewed. Words only confuse and complicate what I prefer to bear witness to my feelings by visual means.” -Camera Magazine, November 1973

Wayne Sorce's photographs are in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the George Eastman House, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, the Exchange Bank of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.