Tyler Haughey (b. 1988, Ocean Township, NJ) received a Bachelor of Science in Photography and Art History from Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. He was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 2015, was chosen as one of Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50 in 2016, and was selected as a Flash Forward Emerging Photographer by The Magenta Foundation in 2017. Recent exhibitions include At A Languorous Pace at Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, NY; The NJSCA Fellowship Exhibition at Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ; and Project Basho’s ONWARD Compé 2015, Philadelphia, PA, which was juried by Elinor Carucci. His work has been featured in such publications as PDN, Slate, Popular Photography, Lonely Planet, American Photo, Fast Company, Spiegel Online (Germany), and Wired Magazine (Japan). He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
About ‘Everything Is Regional’:
The title, taken from a poem by former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky about the area of New Jersey where both he and Haughey grew up, speaks to the vernacular interest and deep connection to place that the subject matter holds. The son of a union sign painter, Haughey’s interest in roadside architecture and signage began at an early age, and as a native of the Jersey Shore, he is greatly influenced by the seasonal economy and off-season vacancy of a tourist destination.
Though many of the locales depicted were photographed during the unpopulated emptiness of the winter months and are devoid of people, the images exude a human presence from the not-so-distant past; people are present through their absence. Haughey draws inspiration from an array of artists that have used this landscape as the basis of some of their most important work, such as the writer John McPhee, architect Andrew Geller, and photographers Gregory Conniff and George Tice. His project Ebb Tide, which takes the midcentury modern motels of The Wildwoods as its subject, acts as a nucleus to Everything Is Regional, and is further discussed and contextualized by Adam Giles Ryan, Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in the introduction to the book.
