A native of Anchorage, Alaska, Dr. Jay (as he is known to some) watches the sky whenever he has the chance. This despite having survived a BSc, an MFA, and a PhD. As an international teacher (or better yet, a learning facilitator) on collaboration, creativity, art, and technology, John has a long history in photography. He is a master printer despite being away from a wet darkroom for awhile: he used to promise his printing students that their eyes would bleed with see-ing by the end of the semester. He made them read “Zen and the Art of Archery.” He made one substantial detour into an education and career in Big Oil and geothermal energy as a geophysical engineer, but cameras were always at hand. John was artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland; at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah; and at the Gilfélagið in Akureyri, Iceland.
Finland? Utah? Iceland? For the last 25 years he’s led a peripatetic life that’s oscillated seasonally between Northern Europe and the Western half of the US (with another detour ‘down under’ for his PhD) although he’s also been spotted at many points in between, and sometimes he gets the seasons backwards.
While watching the sky, he witnessed twelve minutes of totality and twenty-six of partiality chasing solar eclipses around the world with his dad, an avid amateur astronomer and photographer who studied with Ansel Adams.
John has worked and played with (and made portraits of) thousands of really cool and creative people f-2-f in 30 countries. He’s been an online facilitator for Transmediale in Berlin, a workshop presenter at Pixelache in Helsinki and at the ADA in Whanganui, NZ; a member of the Icelandic Artists Union and the Society of Exploration Geophysicists; a volunteer at the Broadway Food Coop in Sydney; a net-art curator at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo; and has tracked mountain lions in several places in Colorado.
He watches the sky whenever possible. He photographs what he sees. Since 1983 his work falls under the moniker “neoscenes.”