Jim Gehrz: Finding my personal vision

Jim Gehrz: »Finding my personal vision: It's All About A Moment«

The basic theme of my talk will revolve around the idea of how important it has been for me over the course of my career to find my own vision and how/why it has evolved. The world of newspaper photojournalism is incredibly competitive and in order to survive in it, I had to find what path that would allow me to keep a newspaper job and also continue to grow as a photojournalist. All I ever really wanted to do is take meaningful photographs, images that would tell a story and perhaps make a difference, and then be allowed to share them with others. I have always perceived myself to be a "home town" photographer in the sense that I wanted to work in the area where I grew up and raise a family. This meant that I could not travel as much as others and so I developed a style to accommodate: that being to find the remarkable moments that occur all around us, all the time in the course of our everyday lives. I began to look for the amazing, fleeting slices of time that, when captured in well-composed photographs, would allow readers/viewers to see just how amazing everyday life really is. Moments preserved through photography allow people to study spontaneous occurrences that, if viewed only in the cluttered, full-speed motion of everyday life, would quickly pass through the consciousness and become lost forever. Of course not all moments are inspirational, and as a photojournalist my mission is to capture all aspects of life, from moments that expose the most terrible aspects of man's inhumanity to fellow man as well as those that serve to inspire.