Many people with a passion for photography share similar origin stories. The first time they saw images by a master photographer struck them with a drive to delve into the wonders of image making so deeply it consumed them and created hope that one day they might create an image a fraction as moving as those from their photographic idols. We all have them, those images we've seen that we can't get out of our heads. The ones that drive us to keep imagining, to keep creating, to keep dreaming, and to keeping playing. Those masters that were my earliest inspirations were photographers that saw their camera as a tool to help bring the image formed in their mind into a format that could be viewed by others. They weren't "portrait photographers" or "landscape photographers" or "fashion photographers", they were photographers. They created images that would be called fashion or commercial photography when printed in a magazine yet would be as easily called fine art when those same images were displayed on a gallery wall. The names Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Edward Weston, Steve McCurry, Pete Turner represent those artists whos work had me in awe. That list continues to grow. 

For myself, this passionate consumption began over thirty five years ago when I was living on a tiny farm in southern Minnesota, USA. Somewhere, I found amongst forgotten and ignored things of my mother, a little Instamatic camera. I was immediately drawn to it. The sound it made as I would wind the film advance dial, the little "click" it made when pressing the shutter button, and of course the wonderful tiny little framing window that let me control what I could see of the world and what I could shut out. It was in that moment I knew the camera and photography aligned with how I thought, how my brain processed the world. It became clear that just everything in life was a lie, or at least a controlled truth. Just as I controlled what would be captured on film by deciding what would and wouldn't be allowed in my frame, so too was my perception of the world being controlled by those that ruled my life; parents, teachers, and other adults. Already a curious kid who questioned everything, this encouraged my perception that my world was influenced by what I was allowed to be exposed to, by what frame I was allowed to look through, and by what the lens was focused on. This curiosity and drive to investigate, question, and see things from different perspectives is what informs my eye and drives me to create my images.

Like many of the photographers who first inspired me I'm interested in all aspects of the world around me, people, architecture, nature, objects. All these things are subjects I might explore. Some photographers prefer to concentrate all their focus on a single genre or type of photography but I can't conform to this idea. If I have a vision to create an image of beauty, that might be just as likely to be the scene of a stream of light illuminating a single tree in a field as it would be to show the sensual curves of the human body. Or, perhaps I need to create a vision of death or decay in which case I may be as likely to photograph a rotting piece of fruit as I would the breakdown of civil liberties and human rights. It's my belief that all things light falls upon are to be considered for my images. If any of my work interests or inspires you and you'd like to learn more about my process or thoughts please contact me.

Jeffrey Wright
photographer