Charles H. Traub

In 1987 Traub was asked to design a graduate studies program for the School of Visual Arts, which became the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department. Since its inception, the program has been distinguished for its innovative use of digital technology, the inclusion of all aspects of the lens and screen arts and its internationally celebrated faculty. As an early advocate of the power of digital photography, Traub adapted it to his own practice. His philosophy about the importance of digital thinking is reflected in the manifesto Creative Interlocutor and the textbook In the Realm of the Circuit. Creative projects that highlight Traub's integration of new technologies include the interactive website Still Life in America and the iBook No Perfect Heroes: Photographing Grant.

After leaving the gallery in 1980 he continued his personal work and formed the Wayfarer partnership with Jerry Gordon—a specialized editorial and corporate photography agency. Their work was featured in many magazines, including Life, Time, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, New York and Avenue as well as annual reports for Fortune 500 companies. Throughout the 1980s Traub traveled to Italy, Brazil, Haiti, Morocco and the Far East for his personal work. Dolce Via and In the Still Life are compendiums of photographs from that period.

In 1971 Traub began teaching full-time at Columbia College Chicago, and was responsible of developing new curriculum for the growing public interest in the medium. He was instrumental in developing the school's Contemporary Trends Lecture Series that celebrated renowned international photographers and image-makers. Subsequently, he became chairperson of the department and founded the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography, which became the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MOCP). In 1973, along with his colleague Douglas Baz, Traub went on a sabbatical to make the Cajun Document, extensive look at the culture of the Louisiana bayous. Traub's first major body of work in color, Street Portraits, began in 1976, continued after his move to New York City shortly thereafter, and culminated in his monograph Lunchtime.

After service in the United States Army in 1969, Traub decided to pursue photography at the Chicago Institute of Design. There he earned his Master of Science studying under Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel and Garry Winogrand. During this time, he began to experiment with different formats and processes in his landscape photographs of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. He has said "You probably recognize the similar sentiment that exists in all of those earlier pictures; they all share a certain kind of Southern Gothic, dark, and maudlin sensibility." His thesis of haunting, abstracted black-and-white positive and negative landscapes, "Edge to Edge", was widely exhibited, and featured in a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago (1975).

Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Traub earned his BA in English literature at the University of Illinois, where both his mother and father had also attended. In 1967, during his last semester of his senior year in college, he took his first photography class with the landscape photographer Art Sinsabaugh using the camera left to him by his recently deceased father. His family roots in both central Illinois and Kentucky gave inspiration for his early photographic work.

Charles H. Traub (born April 6, 1945) is an American photographer and educator, known for his ironic real world witness color photography. He was chair of the photography department at Columbia College Chicago, where he established its Museum of Contemporary Photography (MOCP) in 1976, and became a director of New York's Light Gallery in 1977. Traub founded the MFA program in Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1987, which was the first program of its kind to fully embrace digital photographic practice. He has been Chairperson of the program since. Traub has published many books of his photographs and writings on photography and media.