Harold Jones (b. 1940) has contributed to photography as an artist, educator, curator, and arts administrator. Born in Morristown, NJ, he graduated with a BFA in Painting and Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and an MFA in Art History and Photography from the University of New Mexico. In 1971, Jones became the first director of LIGHT Gallery in New York City, the first gallery to exclusively represent contemporary photographers such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer. He would later go on to become the founding director of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ, and to start the photography program at the University of Arizona where he taught for 30 years. Presently he is professor emeritus and volunteer coordinator of the Voices of Photography oral history project at the Center.
Harold Jones’s photography is difficult to categorize, and there are no generalizations that satisfactorily describe his varied body of work. His original training in painting and photography led to a practice that Jones referred to as “photodrawings” – gelatin silver prints worked with a variety of hand-colored surfaces. The resulting images are unique and cannot be duplicated. Jones’ approach has varied within his unaltered prints as well. He has worked with both multiple and long-duration exposures to capture motion.
Jones’s subjects are everyday objects arranged in compositions that require viewing and re-viewing. The photographer has described his delight in the process in which a person moves beyond a superficial reading of his work for closer inspection. His images reinforce the idea that a world continues beyond the picture plane; that one is seeing a fragment of a larger whole. Although he often photographs mundane objects, such as a water tower or laundry hanging, his unusual vantage points or unexpected cropping, produce a range of effects from humor to mystery.