Buddy Mays

Buddy Mays (b. 1981) is an American photographer whose work explores the interplay between environment and identity. Raised in Miami, he earned a BFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design before moving to New York, where he began documenting the city’s shifting neighborhoods through large‑format portraiture and street studies.

Mays’s early series, Urban Tides, captured the resilience of communities facing rapid gentrification, earning him a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2010. He followed with Silent Witnesses, a collection of environmental portraits made in shuttered industrial sites across the Rust Belt. These images—often staged with fragments of local detritus—highlight the stories embedded in abandoned spaces.

His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. Mays has also published two monographs, Edge of Town (2015) and After the Factory (2019), both of which received honorable mentions in the International Photography Awards. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art and the George Eastman Museum.

In addition to his fine‑art practice, Mays teaches grants‑based workshops on documentary methods at the International Center of Photography and lectures frequently on the ethics of representation in photography. He continues to live and work between New York and Detroit, investigating how landscapes bear witness to both loss and renewal.