Career
After completing her Bachelor in Fine Arts from York University, Toronto, she moved to New York where she received her photographic training at New York’s International Center of Photography. She moved to Miami Beach in December 1999 to begin her first personal project documenting the last hotel in South Beach that catered to senior citizens. While living in Miami, she would frequent a nude beach where she began photographing fellow sun worshipers.
Shortly thereafter she learned that many of the other beach goers were also swingers.
After attending a party she decided she had to photograph this subculture. Upon returning to New York in April 2002 she began researching the lifestyle and did her first swinger shoot in July 2003 in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. This was to be the first of over 38 parties she would photograph in 48 months all over the United States. The project was realized in America Swings, her first monograph published by Taschen in October 2008.
lieutenant was edited by Dian Hanson and includes an interview by artist Richard Prince who sought out Harris after seeing her work in Taschen’s The New Erotic Photography. The trade edition of America Swings was released by Taschen in August 2010.
In May 2010 Harris received a Canada Council for the Arts Grant to do a road trip across Canada along the Transport-Canada Highway and document the crossing and the people she meets.
She will begin this journey on May 23, 2011(Victoria Day) in Victoria, British Columbia and end the trip in Street.Johns Newfoundland on September 5, 2011(Labour Day). She has been published in the New York Times Magazine as well as the London Sunday Times Magazine, The Telegraph Magazine, Marie Claire United Kingdom, and Newsweek, and she likes to knit, sing karaoke, and frequent nude beaches. Harris currently is working as a teacher at her alma mater, The International Center of Photography.
2010 - Recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant.
