Jeremiah Leif Johnson, Chicago
Member Since March 2008
Artist Statement Welcome!
A lot has changed in my life. I've worked as a cowboy, a wandering poet, an academic, and a magazine editor, but through it all I suppose that photography has been one of the only true constants.
In the late 1990s I was a busy figure in the Cowboy Poetry movement, and I would travel throughout the United States and Canada with my works. It was during that time that I became highly interested in photography, although I didn't have the equipment at the time to experiment much with my work. At the time, photography was a way to complement my poetry or to capture a scene so I could try to re-imagine the sensations I had felt; in time, I began to see it as another way of composing poetry.
Somewhere along the line I decided that I needed to go to college, so I got a bachelor's from the University of Texas at Austin (complete with a very brief photography stint at The Daily Texan), and then left my beloved Texas to pursue a master's and a PhD at the University of Chicago. While I was working on my master's, my love of photography was renewed, especially after noticing that there were almost no exceptional photos of the beautiful U of C. I started a photoblog which gained around 1,000 hits a day for a while before I retired the site (as did so many) and simply started posting images to Flickr. I went on to be the editor of a small business magazine, for which I took many of the photographs myself. Today, I'm the Communications Coordinator for S2 Art Group/Jack Gallery.
I met my lovely wife in the process, and together we rediscovered my artistic side that academia had buried for so long. These are the results.
Enjoy.