DuBois grew up in the suburbanNew Jersey community of Far Hills. As a teenager he began taking photographs with a rangefinder camera he found in his father's closet. He has a younger sister Lise and a younger brother, the composer Luke Dubois, who appear often in his early photographs. Dubois graduated from Hampshire College with a Bachelor of Arts if Film and Photography and subsequently received a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. In between his undergraduate and graduate educations, his father suffered a near-fatal fall from a commuter train and spent several years convalescing in the home, and Dubois documented this process as a "kind of emotional protection." These family portraits formed the basis of a body of work surrounding his family that would continue for twenty-four years and eventually come to be published by Aperture as a photo-book titled All the Days and Nights. The photographs in this series document his changing family: his father's recovery from his injuries juxtaposed with the descent of his wife, his sole caretaker, into the depths of depression and mental illness, the dissolution of their marriage, as well as the maturation of his brother and sister. Dubois's interest in the family, both his and others, is also evident in a subsequent photo series, "Avella," which chronicles life in the deindustrialized coal-mining town of Avella, Pennsylvania, where his father grew up. To learn about his family's hometown Dubois would drive his grandmother around in his aunt's car while she identified local landmarks and told stories, often taking pictures as they traveled. He documents the decay and blight of the town, but also the families which live among such an environment of insularity and lack of opportunity. The photographs challenge American "myths" surrounding upward economic mobility and question how American families survive amid economic uncertainty. The themes of economic uncertainty and provincial life are likewise central to Dubois' recent photo series, which was published as the book My Last Day at Seventeen. These photographs depict working class teenagers in a housing estate in Cobh, County Cork, Ireland after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. The series represents the anxiety inherent to the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and how the subjects' anxiety regarding the future is mirrored by their economic uncertainty. Shot over five summers, the series presents an "endless summer" in which precarious teenagers perform identities informed by an international popular visual culture but mediated through a local context. Dubois does not take a snapshot approach to photography instead carefully composing his compositions with supplementary lighting, and using either a medium format camera or a large formatfolding camera with a cloak. He does not consider his work to be documentary, rather he views each photo as a collaborative endeavor between artist and subject which is based in truth. Dubois will often stage or recreate photographs, sometimes even alluding to visual works which are not his own, and has borrowed the literary term "creative nonfiction" to describe his work.
Publications by DuBois
All the Days and Nights. New york: Aperture, 2009..
My Last Day at Seventeen. New York: Aperture, 2015..
