Jennifer Lukas Joyner

I attended the University of Tennessee, where I majored in English and minored in photography and theatre. I was lucky enough to study photography under Baldwin Lee, a student of the renowned photographer Walker Evans. My freelance work began taking shape in Raleigh, North Carolina. From there, I lived and worked in Wilmington, NC, and settled in Tampa 11 years ago. I am married with two incredible boys, and I'm also a writer and actor.

I got my first camera for my 16th birthday - a Canon AE-1 SLR. Though I very much miss film cameras,  I have slowly made my way into the digital world. In my college studies, I started out photographing people. I still do, especially my children. When I photograph someone, I try and capture their essence, something not everyone sees. Sometimes a person only gives a split-second of their visual truth, and it's my job to be fast enough to catch it in a photo. With my nature and art photos, it’s the same. My challenge is to show the viewer something unique about an everyday scene – a perspective they may have missed, overlooked, or something I see and they will never see until I bring it to life. I'm trying to catch the extraordinary in the ordinary. My photos are my way of looking at the world, which is, after all, what art is. But ultimately, the viewers will have their own interpretation of my photographs, which is where the magic of artistic expression fully develops.