The artist Chris Verene often combines photography and performance. In the mid-1990s he shot an exposé-style series of pictures on amateur cheesecake photographers by posing as one himself. In the person of his female alter-ego, Cheri Nevers, he periodically presents his “Self-Esteem Salon,” a therapeutic environment in which he guides willing viewers in acting out healing fantasies for the camera.
But in a remarkable series of photographs that he has been taking over the past 26 years, other people do the performing and he does the looking. The setting is the economically battered town of Galesburg, Ill., where Mr. Verene was born in 1969. The people who appear are members of his family. In the 46 pictures at Postmasters, dating from 1987 to the present, we meet his parents, his grandmother, his great aunt Doris, some of his many cousins — Candi, Heidi, Steve — as well as step-cousins and “a cousin’s husband’s brother’s cousin’s cousins,” to quote a caption hand-written directly on a print.
