Jim Young

Jim Young is both a graduate (MS, 1965) and a former vice president of Buffalo State College. He received a Doctor of Education from SUNY Buffalo in 1969. For decades, Jim Young has dedicated his life to the field of education, serving as the Chancellor at the University of Arkansas (at Little Rock). Over the years, he has broadened his desire for service to others through the creative endeavors of professional photography, as well as a writer of poetic verse and prose for those interested in spiritual and/or self-development.

He began exhibiting his photography and poetry in Mexico, as he displayed sensitive portrayals of the people and life in the quaint community of Ajijic, Mexico. In 1991, the Faud Abed Halabi Foundation of Puebla, Mexico published a book commemorating those exhibitions. Young’s work has been exhibited mainly in various regions of the southern United States, including New Mexico, Arkansas, and Texas. In the late 1980’s, Young conducted a project with upper-elementary-level students in New Mexico, teaching them how to create a photo essay expressing their life in the Tesuque Pueblo. He has also given a number of presentations/lectures on the topics of photography, creative writing, and spiritual development. His images reveal a maturity of understanding of the power of the shutter and the emotional force of color; color is one unifying element spanning the gap between his different images.

A published poet, Jim has also penned 20 spiritual books. He has studied with National Geographic photographers Matt Bradley, Dewitt Jones, and Richard Cooke III, as well as with documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark and fine art photographer Siegfried Halus. Young’s continuing project, “Women of the Village”, is an evolving body of work documenting lives of elderly women in places like Greece, New Mexico, and Mexico.

The personal philosophy which guides Young/s esthetic productivity is perhaps best captured in this statement he wrote in 1985:

“ ‘I discovered the secret of the sea in meditation upon the dewdrops.’ These immortal words of the brilliant poet, Kahlil Gibran, convey the essence of art in all its forms: the means to search the beauty in life; the source of contemplation about the relationship between the visibly known and the unknown.”

“For me, photography and poetry represent an evolving sensitivity to those principles, and in being, are a critically important source of continual intellectual, emotional and spiritual growth.”

Young later goes on to add:

“My work as a photographer deals mainly with the poetry of life. While I prefer photographing people as a means of sharing our soul-life, more recent work is attendant to building relationships with non-human elements of our existence as well, and finding that common essence that bind us together as one.”

Young asserts that we must be vulnerable to life and, in that openness, to allow both joy and pain, belief and doubt, light and dark; that in the acceptance of both, the two may become one.