We are grateful to photographer Michael Wilson for contributing to Art for Jobs. Thanks also to Continuum Arts and Jim Allman for connecting us to artists who have a heart for our mission to bring economic independence to a community working to move from generational poverty to economic independence.
Michael Wilson's bio from his website can be read below, and you can see much more of his incredible work at http://www.michaelwilsonphotographer.com/. The piece shown here is not the piece he has contributed to the show (we eagerly anticipate the arrival of that piece) but considering that 2 of your show organizers are from Texas, we couldn't help but feature one of his photos of Lyle Lovett. Thank you, Michael!
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1959 and I’ve never moved away. A providential conspiracy seems to have been at work in the convergence of friends and events that led me to photography and to the college in Kentucky where I wound up studying photography. This is where I came to love pictures. It was the end of the 1970’s. At that time I didn’t plan to be doing photography for a living, actually—I had no plan. I worked as a janitor, a dishwasher, a laborer, a darkroom technician and eventually as a photographer’s assistant (although I don’t think I was very helpful).
All the while I kept making pictures. In 1985, I published my first book of photographs and writing entitled, Heads Bowed Eyes Closed, No One Looking Around.
A girl named Marilyn, whose portrait I had taken some years earlier, wrote me from New York where she was living at the time and before long we got married. It was almost exactly the middle of the 1980’s.
Nearly clueless, but with little to lose and a wife not afraid, I quit my real job in 1987 to go freelance as a photographer. Twenty-some years now into the adventure, much has changed—both in and out of photography. What hasn’t changed, however, is that strong pictures still resonate and compel and I am grateful to still be in search of them.
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