Colleen Plumb makes photographs, videos, and installations investigating systems that perpetuate power imbalances between humans and nonhuman animals. Her focus for over two decades has been an inquiry into a society whose appetite for animals, whether in flesh or in reproduction, with admiration or obsession, is voracious. Plumb’s recent projects explore the ways animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking, and how a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized, and that consumption masks as curiosity. Her work sheds light on the lives of captive animals in order to bring attention to the implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and a tyranny of artifice. Her recent project Invisible Visible reflects upon the industrial food system and meatpacking industry through the bones and bodies of chickens.
Plumb's work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely exhibited, including the Portland Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Blue Sky Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts in Portland, Dina Mitrani Gallery in Miami, Roman Susan and Edelman Gallery in Chicago, Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Jen Bekman Gallery in New York, and the Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. Her work has been part of the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography since 2003. Plumb has written for the Center for Humans and Nature, and was a contributor to their book, City Creatures (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Plumb’s first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011), critically documents humans’ ambivalent dispositions towards animals. Plumb's recently released photography book, Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants with contributing essays by nine experts working in legal, ethics, and scientific fields. Plumb's work has appeared in LitHub, Psychology Today, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Village Voice, Blow Photo Magazine, Feature Shoot, New York Times LENS, Time Lightbox, LensCulture, Oxford American, Photo District News, and Artillery Magazine. Plumb lives in Chicago and has taught in the photography department at Columbia College Chicago since 1999.