Neha and Christopher W. Luhar-Trice are a husband-and-wife team who use photography to document and respond to their environment. Neha was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has also lived in Kansas. Christopher was born in Anaheim, California but grew up in Alabama. The two met in yet another state, while attending the University of Illinois at Chicago. Christopher returned from Chicago to Alabama in 2003; Neha joined him in 2004. Their recent work is a photographic examination of Alabama’s landscape and culture.

As photographers—and partners—Neha and Christopher often find themselves shooting the same subjects and locations. They believe their images contrast and complement one another, blending familiarity and discovery via the perspectives of both native and newcomer.  Christopher’s images often focus on the peculiarly Southern fascination with the old, the left-behind, and the darkly humorous. He sees the South as a place where icons of the past linger into the present, blending with the contemporary vernacular and creating a rich synthesis of tradition and transition. Neha uses photography as a way to explore her new surroundings, often focusing on details we don’t normally have time to observe during our fast-paced daily lives. The result is a photographic conversation about both the familiar and unusual in the artists’ lives and surroundings.

Neha and Christopher use a wide variety of photographic tools in making their images, but lately have preferred primitive equipment—more toys than “real” cameras—chosen because of their unique ability to render mass and tone rather than detail, feeling rather than description, memory rather than observation. Both traditional darkroom techniques and digital imaging are employed in making final prints.

Neha is currently employed with the Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan, AL. Recent exhibitions of her work include The Heart Gallery of Alabama at the Birmingham Museum of Art and Found at Homewood’s Lyda Rose Gallery. Christopher teaches Photography at Enterprise-Ozark Community College in Enterprise, AL. His photographs have been exhibited at Klein Art Works in Chicago, IL, and his work is in the permanent collection of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography. Both Neha and Christopher were recently featured in The 10^th Annual Krappy Kamera Exhibition at New York City’s Soho Photo Gallery. They are represented in the Birmingham area by Lyda Rose Gallery.