I earned 2 doctorates in the medical sciences (D.V.M., Ph. D), but decided to follow my passion for making art in 2010. I'm self-taught as a photographer and artist, but after 45+ years making art, I never tire of learning better ways to tell visual stories. Even though I chose to pursue a science career in college, it was then that I began photographing and printmaking as a hobby. That's nearly 50 years ago.

It seems I've always been drawn to the romantic-style images I first saw as a child in our family encyclopedia; images full of light and shadow and story. The elegance and luminous qualities of the style (ala Bierstadt, Cole, Durand, and Church) guides me from the moment I get in my truck to hunt for subjects to the moment of printing whatever it is I found. And that almost always involves some manifestation of the curious dance that light and shadow play upon the natural landscape.

There's a deliberate reason why I choose to make a photograph. It's because I want to remember the moment--or more specifically the story that strikes me during the moment. The 'remembering' is a huge part of why I'm a photographer in the first place. Why are we on this earth if not to remember our experiences, our stories; to learn something from them, and to pass them on?

I don't mind being called a "traditional" fine art photographer. I capture my scenes using 'old fashioned' bellows film cameras because that's the best way I know to tell the visual stories as I see them. Using larger format film cameras gives me the ability to create large, elegant exhibition prints that retain details, textures, and depth that smaller cameras can't.

My work appears mostly in private collections in the US and Europe and in several corporate reception centers in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA.

J. Riley Stewart, 2019