State Fair: The Last Living Munchkin from the Wizard of Oz and Other Stories

State Fairs, an annual American ritual, are a willingly accepted assault on the senses—visual, acoustic, gastric (fried beer the latest delicacy)—and a voluntary yielding of personal space to strangers.

"Chadbourne, like [David Foster] Wallace does in prose, brings back amazing images in his signature, close-up style. With his wide-angle lens and flamboyant use of color he finds the kinds of insanely tight juxtapositions that bring to life the crash and chaos, not to mention the pressing humanity, that is the true experience of a fair at full frenzy."—Bill Kouwenhoven)

State Fair is covering fairs across the US: New York, Minnesota, Maine, Georgia, Texas, The Big E, Iowa, Arizona, Florida, Montana, California.

Christopher Chadbourne lives in Boston and has taught design in the Graduate Schools of Design at Princeton, Columbia and Harvard. He was founder and creative director of one of the nation’s leading design firms for the crafting of stories, exhibits and multimedia for some of the country’s most prestigious museums. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease at age 67, he successfully returned to his early passion for photography. His work has been widely exhibted since.

Bill Kouwenhoven is International Editor of HotShoe magazine. HotShoe is Europe's leading contemporary photographic magazine. In addition to working with HotShoe for the past three years, Kouwenhoven is a frequent contributor to numerous other contemporary photography journals in the United States, England and Europe including Afterimage, Aperture, British Journal of Photography, Foto 8, Photonews, Foto, European Photography, and Camera Austria. From 1996 to 2001 he was editor of the late but fondly remembered Photo Metro magazine of San Francisco. He lives and works in Berlin and New York.

Paula Tognarelli is the Executive Director and Curator of the Griffin Museum of Photography.