Brian McKee was born in 1977 in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. He attended the Interlochen Arts Academy and Bard College where he studied photography with Stephen Shore, Larry Fink and Barbara Ess and wrote under John Ashbery.

McKee focused on visualising a body of work that explored both the current and past social and political atmospheres of countries around the world. He called himself “a visual historian” who ventured to “convey a unique and important view of select aspects of World History” with his photographs.

Photographing with an 8x10 inch Deardorff plate camera he composed poetic images, which conveyed a complex untold narrative. He was fond of ”the idea that houses, buildings, towns and cities provide us with a true understanding of the cultures that inhabited those spaces."

His signature subject of the rise and fall first took shape in 1999 when he photographed Soviet military bases in former Eastern Germany. Since that project, the artist built his work around the idea that chaos is something that is never planned within a society, but is nevertheless inevitable. McKee’s last fifteen years of work attempts to ask the question, “How close are we with respect to the fine line that separates order from disorder.” Perhaps more important is the question of how and when do we know that we have crossed this invisible line.