Kerrick James is an immensely talented adventure and tour photographer who’s been a complete-time tour journalist because 1990. He’s internationally acclaimed for his dynamic, brilliantly composed, technically first-rate photographs of vacation spot journey places, structure, nightlife, sports, and flora and fauna; in all likelihood, he’s best known for his transcendent landscapes and charming photos of ecotourism. James has traveled worldwide with his cameras, his pictures have been featured on over 200 e-book and magazine covers, and he’s illustrated and written endless function testimonies for leading travel guides.
He’s also created a ramification of journey-themed books on tour-themed subjects and the famed Route sixty-six. He has taught more than 70 image workshops in locations starting from Alaska to Zambia. His favorite assignments are those that take him on energetic adventures like kayaking, trekking, mountaineering, and exploring the planet’s wild places. An avid outdoorsman, he’s rafted the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon 15 times and lately hiked forty miles inside the Alps, continually returning with compelling pictures that record his adventures and assist others in proportioning his vision and reports. He considers the American West and Pacific Rim his home territory, and he resides in Phoenix, Arizona, with his sons Shane, Royce, and Keanu.
James is a lively 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, additionally, for his enterprise, KJ Photo Safaris.
How did Kerrick James turn out to be so captivated with the journey that it has become the touchstone of his lifestyles’ paintings, and why did he specify that over-the-pinnacle enthusiasm in visual phrases? “I long in the past selected to travel as my muse,” he remembers, “and it has become the high reason for dedicating my existence and career to images. Growing up as a voracious reader inspired me to discover this planet. From my university days, I believed images might provide me with a lifelong creative task and manner to study and partake of the sector’s splendor and cultures.”
“I nevertheless consider in that the electricity of that mission,” he keeps, and due to my lengthy revel in the discipline, I feel that I’ve never done my challenge higher than I do nowadays. I’ve also been lucky to be continually pleased by the human beings and locations that pictures introduced me to. Choosing travel pictures (although, in truth, it appears to have selected me!) enriched my lifestyles in innumerable methods I could scarcely consider.” The Key? “My life has usually been a look for beauty — in nature, in human beings, and in the illuminating slices of time that outline and satisfaction us. I’ve never been tired of my choice of tour pictures, and I don’t suppose I ever will.”
In retrospect, it nearly appears inevitable that James would blossom right into a critical pictures enthusiast and later turn seasoned. Thanks to his father, he grew up in a house chock complete with cameras. He carried them, even trekking the Sierras and Death Valley for his high college days, then studied photography as an artwork media, most important at Arizona State University.
“After college, I had no actual concept of how to make travel pictures into a career,” he freely admits, “but I commenced via shooting for small magazines inside the San Francisco Bay Area, slowly selecting tourism customers while roaming the high-quality American West. It took time, all my time, and plenty of sacrifices, but were many extra magazines warned then (the ’80s-90s), and inventory paid a good deal better. After that, photography became how I defined myself, so going seasoned never became doubtful, but then, as now, it takes everything you’ve got to make a decent living at it.”
