Daniel Traub

Lives and works in Philadelphia, PA

Artist statement

My photographic work explores how history, migration, and economic change shape everyday urban life. I work with portraits, landscapes, and interiors, looking at the relationships between people and their surroundings. I am particularly interested in places where social divisions take physical form: the uneven development at a city’s edge, the gap left by a demolished house, the transparent barrier inside a neighborhood restaurant. These concerns have developed through sustained work in Philadelphia, where I grew up and now live, and China, where I lived from 1998 to 2007. My Chinese heritage and my experience of both places inform questions of belonging, proximity, and distance that recur throughout the photographs. Home and the World (2018–ongoing) examines how global forces become present within the local life of Philadelphia. Its photographs of people, storefronts, interiors, and improvised arrangements attend to the ways migration and commerce shape the city, and to the individual choices through which people inhabit and alter it. North Philadelphia (2008–2013) brings portraits of residents together with vacant lots, churches, and Chinese takeout restaurants in predominantly African American neighborhoods shaped by industrial decline. The relationship between the portraits and the surrounding landscape is central: the photographs consider the neighborhood’s material conditions alongside the presence and individuality of the people who call it home. The China...

Artwork