Kerrick James is an immensely gifted journey and journey photographer who’s been a full-time journey journalist since 1990. He’s internationally acclaimed for his dynamic, brilliantly composed, technically awesome photographs of destination journey places, architecture, nightlife, sports, and wildlife, and he’s probably greatly recognized for his transcendent landscapes and captivating images of ecotourism. James has traveled all around the globe together with his cameras. His photos have been featured on over two hundred ebook and magazine covers, and he’s illustrated and written infinite feature stories for leading travel guides.
He’s also created a selection of tour-themed books on tour-themed subjects, including the famed Route sixty-six, and has taught more than 70 image workshops from Alaska to Zambia. His favorite assignments take him on lively 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 instances and lately hiked 40 miles within the Alps, usually returning with compelling photographs that record his adventures and assist others in sharing his vision and reviews. He considers the American West and Pacific Rim his home territory, and he is living in Phoenix, Arizona, along with his sons Shane, Royce, and Keanu.
James is an active member of the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW), Through Each Other’s Eyes (TEOE), and North American Travel Journalists (NATJA). He teaches picture workshops for Arizona Highways Photoscapes and his business enterprise, KJ Photo Safaris. How did Kerrick James become so obsessed with travel that it has become the touchstone of his life’s work, and why did he make explicit that over-the-top enthusiasm in visible terms?
I long ago chose travel as my muse,” he remembers, “and it became the prime cause for dedicating my lifestyle and profession to pictures. Growing up as a voracious reader stimulated me to discover this planet. From my college days, I believed pictures might offer a lifelong artistic challenge and a possible way to look at and partake of the world’s beauty and cultures.
“I nonetheless consider in that the strength of that mission,” he continues, and due to my lengthy experience within the area, I feel that I’ve never done my venture better than I do nowadays. I comprehend I’ve been fortunate to be continually pleased by the human beings and places that images delivered me to. Choosing journey photography (although it seems to have selected me!) enriched my existence in innumerable ways I should consider scarcely.” The Key? “My life has continually been a search for splendor — in nature, human beings, and within the illuminating slices of time that define and delight us. I’ve never been bored with my preference for tour photography, and I don’t assume I ever will.”
In retrospect, it almost seems inevitable that James would blossom into a serious picture enthusiast and later a flip-pro. Thanks to his father, he grew up in a house full of cameras. He carried them while trekking the Sierras and Death Valley at some point in his excessive college days, then studied pictures as an artwork media at Arizona State University.
“After university, I had no real concept of how to make your images into a profession,” he freely admits, “however, I began with the aid of shooting for small magazines inside the San Francisco Bay Area, slowly selecting tourism clients while roaming the notable American West. It took time, all my time, and masses of sacrifice; however, there were many greater magazines lower back then (the ”80s-’90s), and stock paid a lot higher. Photography became how I defined myself, so going pro turned into in no way doubt; however, then, as now, it takes the whole lot you’ve got to make a respectable living at it.
Kerrick James loved exploring the desert, and he did so constantly at the same time as in excessive school, continually bringing his camera along. While he discovered that pictures become powerful, he also found that pictures bring a flavor of nature back to the metropolis. In university, he uncovered the history of the medium and photographers working in an expansion of genres, and that’s what spurred him to transport beyond his early fascination with traditional landscapes.
During that length, he shot black-and-white avenue photographs in San Francisco, a chain on the towns at the Mexican border. He finished his first big project, ‘Pacific Summer,’ a black-and-white film imaginative and prescient of the California seaside as a public degree. “I long to return to that subject,” he notes wistfully.
