Alex Sweetman’s photographic education began as a student at the Center of the Eye in Aspen, where he had the opportunity to meet and work with many of the most important photographers in America.
He did his graduate work with Nathan Lyons at the Visual studies workshop, in Rochester, New York, where he had the pleasure of working with Joan Lyons, Newhall, Frederic Sommer, John Wood, and others. He taught history for over a decade at the Art Institute of Chicago, before taking a position to develop an interdisciplinary program in Media Arts in Colorado. His creative work is in the permanent collections of over three dozen museums in the US and abroad. He has produced major pieces of public art and a wide range of limited editions from letterpress. He has curated numerous exhibitions including the seminal exhibition at the California Museum of Photography in 1984 of a 375 book of the history of the photographic book.
For over 40 years he has focused on the phenomenon of photo publishing and has worked to assemble one of the largest and finest public collections of its kind in the world. His photographic work over the last 30 years has been in panoramic color photography in the US and Mexico, which he is currently archiving and printing digitally.