System of Lines and Shadows
by Jay Waters

"The world around us is filled with drama, with beauty, with stories. Yet even a trillion cameras often fail to capture most of it, because we all pay so little attention to our surroundings. Instead, those cameras are used to tell the story of “I’m”--what I’m doing, who I’m with, where I’m at.
The photos in this collection are examples of what we can accomplish if we just look. When I mention to people that all of them are taken on my phone, the response is always the same. How did you take that picture with a phone? It is as if technology itself is what creates photographs that capture the world around us. There’s nothing technologically sophisticated about what I do—no special software or lenses. I focus and frame with my feet. Great photos are just the coincidence of life and light and whatever camera you have available—and the willingness to see something other than “I’m.” There’s enough good out there that you don’t have to invent something new if you are simply paying attention.
Black and white is my preference because I think it strips away any distractions and noise, and it tells better stories. While there are many photographers who use black and white that I admire and feel artistic kinship with, the artist that influences my work the most is the painter Edward Hopper."

 © Jay Waters

Jay Waters is a native Alabamian currently in the middle of his third career, teaching full-time in the Advertising and PR Department at the University of Alabama.
Jay’s artistic focus is on mobile phone photography of the images, scenes, and stories that naturally appear during one’s day, whether at home or traveling. This reflects Jay’s artistic influences, drawn from various fields: Edward Hopper, Randy Newman, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, and Alfred Bierstadt. In particular, Jay was influenced by the black and white photographs from the American Civil Rights Movement when he was growing up in the 1960s from photographers such as Gordon Parks, Spider Martin, and Charles Moore. 
Jay’s approach to mobile photography is about serendipity—to be alert at the appearance of something interesting and try to do the best job of framing and capturing that interesting moment with his phone. Landscape-oriented black and white photos are his preferred format. Very minimal processing with Photoshop or other software is used, if ever. The idea is to try to let the moment be the image.
Jay’s photos have appeared in many online and print journals in the US, Canada, UK and Sweden, including The Lincoln Review, The Arkansas Review, The Wondrous Real, Straight Forward Poetry, The Broken City and Reunion, and The Dallas Review. More at www.jaywatersphotos.com

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