Bruce Polin was born in NYC in 1960 and began photographing at the age of 14. Polin later studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and later received a BFA at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He assisted photographer Neil Slavin, printed for Rosalind Solomon, and, in the ‘80s, managed an art gallery in New York City’s East Village. He later started New York Dupes, a slide and transparency duplication service for art galleries and museums. Polin was the first ‘official’ photographer for the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY. In the early ‘90s he founded Descarga, a music company specializing in Afro-Latin dance music.
In 2013 he began a portrait project in his basement studio using 8x10 film cameras as well as a relatively obscure 4x5 twin-lens camera called the Gowlandflex.
In 2016 Polin began a long-term project, taking portraits of strangers in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park using his folding 8x10 camera. Post-pandemic, he has been continuing this work in the park using both analog and digital cameras.
He lives in Brooklyn NY with his wife, Jennifer, and their two cats, Gómez and Nunzio.
