John Chervinsky

• Name — John Chervinsky • Born — 1961 • Birthplace — Niagara Falls, New York • Died — 2015 • Known for — photography, engineering • Style — post-photography, staged photography, constructed image • Spouse — Kirsten Chervinsky • Website — John Chervinsky website

John Chervinsky was an American engineer and self taught photographer. He was born in 1961 in Niagara Falls, New York and died in 2015 at the age of 54 due to pancreatic cancer. After his death, the John Chervinsky Emerging Photography Scholarship at the Griffin Museum of Photography was established with the intent to provide support and encouragement in the professional lives of emerging photographers; enhancing their ability to develop their personal vision for photography. His photographs have been widely published in The Los Angeles Times, LeMond, South Korea’s Photo+, among others. Chervinsky’s main occupation was an engineer in applied physics. For 28 years Chervinsky ran a particle accelerator at Harvard University and went on to work at the Harvard’s Rowland Institute for Science, where he collaborated with various museums to analyze works of art using the elementary particle accelerator. Until 2001, Chervinsky focused on street photography but changed the focus of his subject matter when three major tragedies occurred. In the span of a year his wife, Kirsten Chervinsky, became ill, the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center occurred, and his friend Guy Pollard, a fellow photographer, died unexpectedly. With the combinations of these three events, Chervinsky focused on studio photography that combined his love for the arts and physics.

In 2005, Chervinsky had his first exhibit at the Griffin Museum. He then exhibited in a traveling exhibition organized by the George Eastman House. His work has also been exhibited at the Spencer Museum of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, the Fitchburg Art Museum, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. He has had solo exhibitions at the Michael Mazzeo Gallery in New York City, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Art Gallery, Richard Levy Gallery, and the Blue Sky Gallery, also known as the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts.

Chervinsky's photographic works are in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Wright State University Gallery Collection, the Steen Art Collection of the Harvard Business School, List Visual Art Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, among others.