About Barry Phipps
Barry Phipps is a multimedia artist, documentarian and archivist based in Iowa City. Since graduating from The Kansas City Art Institute in 1990, he has spent over three decades exploring these disciplines.
Barry currently runs The Barry Phipps Shop, a full service photography and printing service in Iowa City, and maintains his own archive of art made over a 40 year period at barryphippsarchive.com
Barry’s approach to documentary photography is inseparable from his daily work at The Barry Phipps Shop. Both focus on archiving vulnerable historical materials with absolute technical precision—layering visual records with exact physical details so that the true sequence of history is protected and allowed to speak for itself.
His first published book of documentary photographs Between Gravity and What Cheer: Iowa Photographs was released in 2018, and Driving a Table Down in 2020, both by the University of Iowa Press. His work has appeared in numerous media publications, including The Washington Post.
“By capturing the present moment while referencing the past with faded signs, almost obliterated murals, closed businesses in quiet towns, forgotten tourist attractions, and many other layers of historical accumulations, the photographs document the stark fact that the present is never entirely present tense. Phipps’s attention to the real-time details of rural regions of the Midwest, juxtaposed with personal photographs of his family, gives us a momentary definition of America in a state of flux, an America that looks to the past in a time of an uncertain future.”
In the 90's he was a member of Chicago indie rock group The Coctails, appearing on MTV, performing at Lollapalooza and touring across the US and Japan. He was a resident DJ for several years at Chicago’s Smart Bar. He founded Beep Media, Inc. in late 90s, a mobile DJ business with a staff of ten DJs.
In the 2000's he founded North Branch Recording Studio and the Tight Ship Records label, which has recently reissued The Coctails records on Spotify, and three solo albums of Barry’s original music.
In recent years he has worked as a professional photographer in Chicago and Iowa City. He has documented weddings nationally and abroad, including France, Italy, and Sweden.
in 2023 Barry earned an MFA with highest distinction from the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, and a certificate from the University of Iowa Center for the Book.