Photography
THREE DECADES AND COUNTING…Photographers listen with their eyes.
For more than three decades, I’ve used a camera to observe people and capture moments in time. I learned photography young, and somewhere along the way learned that the best photographs rarely come from asking someone to become something for the camera. They come from paying attention—watching closely, and waiting patiently for a beautiful truth to reveal itself.
That idea has followed me throughout my career. I’ve photographed people who love being in front of a camera and people who would rather be anywhere else. Celebrities, politicians, public figures, expectant mothers, brides-to-be, and grieving parents. Portraits, editorials, campaigns, families, quiet moments and historic ones. The circumstances change, but the practice remains much the same: look closely, earn trust, and try to capture something that feels true to the person standing in front of me.
You see what I see. There is beauty in the truth of an image. It does not lie or try to convince. It is a record of a person, a place, a moment as I witnessed it. It simply exists.
I am merely the vehicle for that visual truth and record.
Much of my photographic archive has not survived the years. In 2009, damage to the storage of my negatives, prints, and physical portfolios meant that nearly all of my work from 1995 to 2009 was lost. A decade later, in 2019, a catastrophic hard-drive failure took much of what remained of my digital archive.
Some of the photographs that survive exist only because smaller versions had been published online; several of the images here bearing the “JAS” logo were recovered from my Flickr account. As a result, some appear at lower resolutions or image quality than I would ordinarily present.
I will always mourn what was lost. But with time, I’ve also come to appreciate something about impermanence—and to feel differently about what remains.
The photographs gathered here are fragments of a much larger body of work—color film, black-and-white film, and digital images spanning decades. They cannot reconstruct the archive that disappeared, but they can preserve something of the people, places, and moments in history I was fortunate enough to witness.
Perhaps that is what I have always loved about photography in the first place: its ability to hold onto something that otherwise would have passed.
These are some of the moments that remain.
