Tray Station, Commons, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA

"My interest in photography centers on its capacity for exact description... I use photography to try to record the manifestations of human ingenuity and spirit still remaining in our country's everyday landscape." — Jim Dow

Jim Dow's interest in those places where people enact their everyday rituals, from the barbershop to the baseball park, has guided the path of his photographic career. Dow is concerned with capturing "human ingenuity and spirit" in endangered regional traditions—a barbershop with a heavy patina of town life covering the walls, the opulent time capsule of an old private New York club, the densely packed display of smoking pipes in an English tobacconist shop—all artifacts of a vanishing era.

An early influence was Walker Evans's seminal book American Photographs (1938). Dow recalls the appeal of Evans's "razor sharp, infinitely detailed, small images of town architecture and people. What stood out was a palpable feeling of loss...pictures that seemingly read like paragraphs, even chapters in one long, complex, rich narrative."

Dow first gained attention for his panoramic triptychs of baseball stadiums, a project that began with an image he made of Veteran's Stadium in Philadelphia in 1980. Using an 8" x 10" camera, he has documented more than two hundred major and minor league parks in the United States and Canada. — The Getty Museum