There is an old saying “Those who can’t do, teach”, but EvCC Photography Instructor Nancy Jones stands in defiance of this common turn of phrase.
The details of her life are a testament to the vast knowledge and experience required to earn the responsibility of teaching others. In the following, Jones freely shares these facts, including where she lived prior to Washington, her family, education, her many different careers working with photography and on independent films, what led her to photography and why she became a teacher.
JS: I’d like to start with just some basic info, such as where were you born?
NJ: So my name is Nancy Ellen Jones, and I go by Nancy Jones here because my colleague is named Ellen and it gets really confusing. I was born in Rocky River, Ohio and when I was 12 years old I moved to Massachusetts. I finished high school there. Since then I’ve been sort of moving around, because I’m super curious and — you know — I want to know where the best tacos are.
I have one brother, and he and his wife and daughter live in Manhattan and my folks have passed. I have one daughter, who goes by the moniker of Peanut — she’s freaking amazing — and one dog named Rainy. She’s a shepherd mix.
JS: Do you have a favorite place that you have lived?
NJ: So, I’ve lived in eight different states for various reasons. I think San Francisco was my favorite.
I love San Francisco because it’s incredibly inclusive. It’s a culture of misfits and innovative people — which, pro tip, they’re basically the same. It’s no wonder that San Francisco often revolutionizes culinary arts, creative arts. It’s just because it’s a place of possibility, and I love the weather, and I love just northern California.
I really enjoyed my time there. I think sometimes I wish I hadn’t left, but I had to leave. Had I not left, many other beautiful things might not have happened in my life. Sometimes hard choices are always the better choices.
JS: Which schools did you attend for your college education?
NJ: I first went to college in New Hampshire and then I went back to school to the Academy of Art in San Francisco to get my degree in film. My first degree is in anthropology. … Very useful … and then I have my Master’s in Fine Arts from Tufts School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
JS: What types of careers did you have before you started teaching?
NJ: When I went back to school for film, I worked in film in a myriad of capacities for many years, and working in the creative services industry — be that as a photo producer for folks like West Elm and Pottery Barn … or working as an on-set photographer or commercial photographer or any of those things. I was also a location manager for many years.
They’re really long days, and sometimes they fly you all over the place and it’s hard to — it’s just hard on your body. It can be fun and lucrative, and it’s the best cocktail party job ever because people think it’s so interesting, and selective memory kicks in and you forget about how hard it is.
I wanted to include … the story about how I was firmly suggested to not pursue photography because I think that that’s one of the things, I always tell that story in my class, and I think it’s important for folks to know. Just because I liked photography … I didn’t actually pursue it as a career until I was long into adulthood.
I have dyslexia — and at the time they didn’t know what that meant, and they took me in and read to me really slowly and told me that I was not intelligent enough to take a photography class in high school. And so, I continued to love it, right? And so I was much more of your autodidactic. I taught myself as much as I could and tried to figure it out.
And, you know, there weren’t YouTube videos to watch back then, so you had to read some dry and boring book. And instructions were not always clear because there’s definitely a history of photography trying to be exclusive.
I didn’t even know you could be a photographer. I didn’t even know it was a job, even though I lived in a world where there’s pictures everywhere. And so I think it’s important to recognize that, like, I even went back to school for film. I didn’t go to photography.
I went for motion picture, right? Like, I was still looking at photography, but I was like — no, it’s just moving really quickly. It’s 24 frames a second instead of one. So, you know, I think that your passion doesn’t necessarily manifest into your career automatically.
You often can’t escape whatever your passion is. I make photographs in my head on a daily basis, even though I don’t get the opportunity to create as much as I would like to because teaching at this level requires a lot of, you know, to be a teacher. It doesn’t give me as much of an opportunity to be an artist.
It serves me well and allows me to have — I mean, I love my summers off. Everyone says you should go teach in the summer. That’s when I get to take pictures.
That’s when I get to travel. My travel bug gets fed. My art bug gets fed.
JS: Have you had any other jobs as a photographer?
NJ: I had a host of random clients. I did promotional materials for a rock climbing clothing company. I had the opportunity to photograph farm aid. I had a host of random little jobs.
When you work in creative services in any capacity, it’s a freelance job. You are taking jobs as they come. I had a host of weird little jobs. Nothing that’s earth-shattering, but it’s all sort of important. I think we underestimate the amount of images we look at on any given day.
Somebody made them, even the really awful ones. Somebody got paid to do that.
JS: What sparked your interest in photography?
NJ: I’m not the person who got the camera at five years old. As I became a teenager and a younger adult, a camera was a great way to get into a room with folks who I was either intimidated by or experienced something.
People will let you through if you have a camera. It’s sort of funny, and it’s funny now, but it’s really true. I had a lot of friends who were musicians or musically inclined and so it was a great way to hang out with them and feel useful.
JS: So how did you decide you wanted to become a teacher?
NJ: I found myself, as I was in my 30s, using my vacation time in between jobs to fly home and help out my folks who were living in Massachusetts at the time — and I finally was like, I’m going to need a backup plan. So I decided to go back to school for photography — well, to get a master’s degree with the hope that one day I would teach.
I figured that was a good opportunity to, I believe, as I said in the moment ‘poach off the energy of the youth.’ And it’s an opportunity to stay up to speed on technology and things like that, and so I applied to grad school … I got in at Boston — which was really great because then I got to be close to my folks and within being home for six months, my mom was super sick, and then my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, so it worked out that I was there at the right time. I was able to document a lot of that, which is a great way to process things.
Sometimes life is easier if you have a camera between you and what’s happening, so that’s kind of how I got there — and so, yeah, so that’s sort of how I got into the idea of teaching, and then in grad school you teach part of (it). So for folks who don’t know, most graduate school programs have the capacity to pay for your schooling entirely.
You get, in my case, I got a 60% scholarship and then a 40% work study. Which meant I was a teaching assistant and that money went into paying the rest of my tuition. I think one of the things people don’t know about higher education is that there’s way more avenues to pursue your degree at places that you think are unattainable.
My dad was a corporate executive, but he was the most creative and understanding person I’ve ever met. He was really good at teaching things.
I see that now. I see that I must have inherited the, “Here, let me help you.” I’m too busy helping other people become artists.
I really enjoy it. I like to watch people soar. I like to educate the whole person.
I see photography as an opportunity to teach and discuss broader outcomes, right? We can talk about following your dreams.
We can talk about what it’s like to feel supported. We can talk about what happens in an image, why it’s impactful to some and not to others. We can talk about speaking critically about something, which is something America is pretty poor at these days.
So we can talk about what’s not working and what is working and how can we, you know, assist each other in getting better at things. And I think that that’s huge. So that’s the stuff that I come to work for, you know, to give everybody an opportunity to have fun for a couple hours a day.
Like, yeah, it might be challenging. Yes, I’m going to grade you rigorously, but I want it to be fun. I want us to have a safe space to create, to share what we see and how we see the world.
And that’s the stuff that keeps me coming back when I’m like, I wish that I had six hours a day to make art, but I don’t because this is what’s requiring my attention right now. It’s that part that is fulfilling. And it’s hard because, and this is not anything against teaching or effort, it’s that I don’t think my body and my productivity can ever keep up with my brain.
I have 8,000 things I want to make, 30,000 projects that I wish I could complete. And so, you know, teaching at least gives me an opportunity to throw some of those out there to other people and be like, you should go take this picture — “Why don’t you go do a series of images on all the churches and then put those pictures next to all the bars in your town and see what that looks like?”
One of my students actually introduced me to the fact that there are — I think, and I have not checked this out, but the equal amount of bars and churches in Snohomish.
There’s a southern motto which is — ‘Sin on Saturday, saved on Sunday.’
JS: Do you find that you’re still passionate about photography after all these years?
NJ: Oh, I love this question. Yes and no. And what I mean by that is that I think that photography is more than taking pictures.
So if we think about it as an art form, it is more than just pressing the shutter. And I think parts of it I’m more passionate about at different times. I love printing and I love creating objects.
So I do a process … where I print my photographs on rice paper. I adhere them to wood panels. I use encaustic wax.
I rub in pigments and charcoal and various things … I create kind of a one-of-a-kind piece.
Sometimes I want to learn how to do a historic process, so I’ll do that for a minute, and so I think it just sort of depends. What I think is really interesting about art and … what’s going on in our personal lives impacts our ability to create.
After my dad died, I couldn’t take a picture. My mentor was like, just keep pressing the button. I made, I don’t know — a year, two years worth of nothing but garbage, and I didn’t realize that our conversations about photography fed my desire to make images.
I didn’t realize how connected … it was so subconscious, I didn’t even know that I no longer had this person to be like, here look what I did — who didn’t understand at all what I did, which was kind of the fun part.
So I wasn’t sure I was ever going to come back from that, and that was right when I was getting into teaching and I didn’t know what that was going to look like. So just returning every day, pressing the button, making garbage imagery, putting it aside, making more and then I finally emerged. So, you know, grief does funny things.
I think what’s happening in your life — you know, you get the greatest job in the world, you get married or whatever — maybe don’t take pictures, maybe you take more pictures. So I think that changes over time. I think I will always carry a camera and capture what’s happening — what I see as beautiful, what just captures my imagination.
I think I’ll do that forever, even if I don’t do anything with it. I am my worst student in that I very rarely these days submit to exhibitions that I know I should be a part of. It’s just a time thing.
I think because my life has taken so many weird twists and turns, that I’m a good example to folks who maybe have had their own twists and turns — that you can do many things. You don’t have to do the one thing and maybe you haven’t found the place that you fit in yet. Finding a place to fit in is hard.
JS: Do you have any advice for someone considering a career in photography?
NJ: Nobody sucks at taking pictures.
They just think they do. I think if it is something that is of interest to you, you should pursue it in whatever capacity you can. Careers in photography are going to change. They always have.
If you tell me that careers in photography don’t exist anymore, I ask you to look around — there are so many images out there all the time in social media and billboards everywhere. Someone is making those, right? Whether they’re taking stock images, someone took those stock images.
Is it possible that we’re going to end up with all AI? Maybe, but I feel like we’re a ways away from that. Where I get up on my soapbox about why you should follow any desire that you have to be in creative services in any capacity is if you remember lockdown, when we were all locked down in this global pandemic, what did everyone rely on?
They relied on movies. They relied on social media. They relied on baking bread.
They relied on making music. They relied on art. And it breaks my heart when I see colleges and institutions who, as they return back and begin to focus back on sort of what they’ve always focused on, which is STEM, that they forget the importance of the arts and where the low hanging fruit.
And I’m not saying necessarily here at Everett, just in academia, the world in general thinks art is disposable and it’s not. It’s so important. It helps us through.
We need our poets. We need our painters. We need our photographers.
Follow your heart. It might show up in a completely different way.
Just to plug for our program, we get students who graduate from our AFA program and are accepted into Rhode Island School of Design, School of the Visual Arts in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago — Columbia College. Our program and our students are as good as any in the nation.
So yeah — study art.
Utility at the bottom: For those interested, Nancy Jones instructs many different photography courses at EvCC — including Introduction to Digital Photography, Studio Lighting, Still Life and Portraiture, Advanced Processing and Art and Social Justice.
To see more of Nancy Jones’ photography, visit: https://www.nancyellenjones.com/home
