Background
Howard Samuel Bossen was born in 1948 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
historian Photographer teacher
Howard Samuel Bossen was born in 1948 in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Bossen earned a doctorate and a master's degree in the history of photography at Ohio State University in Athens (1979, 1976). He studied photography at the Philadelphia College of Art, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in fine arts (1972), and at the Institute of Design in Chicago (1968-69).
He has been an assistant professor in photo-journalism at Michigan State University since 1979 and has also taught in the Art Department at Denison University in Granville, Ohio (1978-79), and at the Philadelphia College of Art ( 1974-75).
He joined SPE in 1976 and has been the recipient of two grants: one from the Ohio Arts Council (1976-77) and one from the Ohio State University Graduate School, from which, in the same year (1978), he also received a Fellowship.
Bossen described his image-making as falling into “three broad categories: (1) Explorations of the human form. These images are primarily multiple exposures of male and female body parts. ... (2) Personal documents. A detailed examination of the private and generally mundane moments in the lives of my family and friends . . . and, (3) Commercial work." His writing deals with historical and critical investigations of various aspects of photography.