Jim Marx


Jim was born and raised in the great city of Chicago. Interested in the visual arts from a relatively early age, he spent many hours getting acquainted with the collection of paintings from the Impressionist period,housed at the Chicago Art Institute. He may have missed some days of school because of this, but education is education. During the sixties and seventies, he was also keenly interested it the emerging work of the Street Photographers who were garnering more and more attention in the Art World.

While at school in the early seventies, he acquired his first 35mm camera. Loading his camera with black and white film, he had to rely on the drug store or camera shops to get film processed and prints printed. As time went by, he realized that he wanted and needed more control of his images. The late seventies saw him enrolled in the photography department at Columbia College in Chicago. During the two years of study at Columbia, he had the great fortune to get the notice of several of the artist teaching there. Mentored by artist such as Arthur Lazaar and Charles Traub, he was encouraged to find his way, expressing himself with photography.

The early part of his photographic journey was comprised of black and white images, produced on large, medium and small formats. Curious about so many things in the world his imagery would span many different genres, from the pastoral to the erotic. As the digital age encroached, it was with some hesitation and trepidation that he finally picked up a digital camera. It introduced him to the world of color.

Impressionism and contemporary photographers were not his only influences. A bibliophile since childhood, the world of literature was always another factor. Drawing and painting were not something he could depend on, neither was writing. He discovered that he could combine his interest in these various mediums using a machine, a camera.

The early work, were images designed to suggest a story, a sentence, a paragraph, a small piece of literature. Some years back, a friend suggested he write a poem. Camera in hand, he began to create visual poems,pictures that could evoke emotions in the viewer. The thrust of much of the current work are these visual poems. Alright, sometimes his kitten is the subject of his pictures.

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