In the late eighties, James Shull had the opportunity to work in a printing press at his high school, which incidentally was well-equipped with a darkroom. This experience provided the source code for what became one of the principal efforts of his life. From then on, he never put the camera down. He spent the better part of his twenties learning and working in commercial photography, while gleaning inspiration from the likes of Edward Weston and other legendary American west-coast photographers.
Amidst having a military career which spanned over two decades with relocations across the U.S., James continued to explore and capture imagery that appeals to a sense of place - providing him with something that he can’t quite define with certainty. It’s been over 35 years of wandering, accompanied by profound serendipitous moments of “…that just works!”
He is compelled to explore the spaces where nature and human influence intersect, like the discoveries he’s uncovered in the rusted-out detritus of an American ghost town, the stacked fishing gear in an east-coast marina, or the reconstituted adobe architecture of the Spanish missions throughout the west. It is these relatively commonplace, sometimes mundane, features of our landscape that beg for him to see them with a more curious eye.
