Kerrick James is an immensely proficient journey and journey photographer who’s been a full-time journey journalist since 1990. Internationally acclaimed for his dynamic, brilliantly composed, technically high-quality pix of vacation spot travel places, architecture, nightlife, sports activities, and the natural world, he’s likely fine known for his transcendent landscapes and charming images ecotourism. James has traveled worldly together with his cameras. His images have been featured on over two hundred book and mag covers, and he’s illustrated and written infinite function stories for main tour publications.
He’s also created various journey-themed books on tour-themed topics, including the famed Route sixty-six. In addition, he has taught more than 70 picture workshops in locations ranging from Alaska to Zambia. His preferred assignments are people who take him on energetic adventures like kayaking, trekking, mountain climbing, and exploring the planet’s wild places. An avid outdoorsman, he’s rafted the Colorado River inside the Grand Canyon 15 times and hiked 40 miles in the Alps. He always returns with compelling snapshots that file his adventures and helps others share his imagination and prescient studies. He considers the American West and Pacific Rim his domestic territory, and he resides in Phoenix, Arizona, with his sons Shane, Royce, and Keanu.
James is an energetic member of the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW), Through Each Other’s Eyes (TEOE), and North American Travel Journalists (NATJA). In addition, he teaches picture workshops for Arizona Highways Photoscapes and his very own employer, KJ Photo Safaris. So how did Kerrick James end up so passionate about travel that it became the touchstone of his existing work, and why did he decide to express that over-the-top enthusiasm in visible terms? “I long ago chose journey as my muse,” he recalls, “and it became the prime motive for dedicating my lifestyle and profession to Photography. Growing up as a voracious reader inspired me to discover this planet. From my university days, I believed that images might offer me a lifelong creative undertaking and a possible manner to examine and partake of the world’s splendor and cultures.”
“I nonetheless accept as true within that the electricity of that project,” he continues, and due to my long enjoyment within the field, I feel that I’ve in no way executed my mission better than I do these days. I understand I’ve additionally been fortunate to be usually thrilled by the people and places that images brought me to. Choosing journey pictures (although in reality, it appears to have selected me!) enriched my lifestyles in innumerable methods I could scarcely consider.” The Key? “My existence has constantly been a search for splendor — in nature, human beings, and inside the illuminating slices of time that outline and delight us. As a result, I’ve never been uninterested in my preference for tour images, and I don’t assume I ever will.”In retrospect, it nearly seems inevitable that James could blossom into a serious images enthusiast and later flip seasoned. Thanks to his father, he grew up in a house full of cameras. He carried them while trekking the Sierras and Death Valley throughout his excessive college days, then studied images as an artwork media major at Arizona State University.
“After university, I had no real concept of how to make tour pictures into a profession,” he admits. “However, I began with the aid of capturing for small magazines in the San Francisco Bay Area, slowly selecting tourism clients while roaming the first-rate American West. It took time, all my time, and masses of sacrifice, but there have been many greater magazines again then (the ‘80s-‘90s), and inventory paid much better. After that, Photography became how I described myself, so going seasoned become by no means in doubt, but then, as now, it takes the entirety you’ve been given to make a decent living at it.”
Kerrick James cherished exploring the desert and did so continuously at the same time as in high school, usually bringing his digital camera along. That’s when he discovered that pictures also became a powerful way to convey a taste of nature again to the metropolis. In college, he became exposed to the medium’s recordsographers working in an expansion of genres, which spurred him to move beyond his early fascination with traditional landscapes. James holds a BFA, Bachelor of Fine Arts, in Photography, from Arizona State University; however, apart from obtaining a huge-ranging aesthetic heritage, he doesn’t suppose that formal education prepared him for making a living in Photography.
“I did avidly take a look at the works of the photographic masters along with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, W. Eugene Smith, and Henri Cartier-Bresson,” he recollects, “but it changed into a dangerous meeting with French tour shooter Bernard Plossu that gave me a bounce-start, a literal visual jolt. His poetic black and white pictures of Mexico, Africa, and my cherished Southwest shot on Kodak Tri-X movie opened my eyes and freed me up to imagine what I should see and create. I owe him a debt of thank you wherever he can be. American Photographer a few years ago known as him a ‘troubadour on the horizon,’ a turn of phrase I envied, but which I have always aspired to.”
