Joel Simpson

Feeling at Home in the Wilderness

New Jersey native Joel Simpson has been photographing since he was a teenager in the 1960s, turning pro in 2002. He is largely self-taught as a photographer. In between, he received a PhD in comparative literature from Brown (1976), spent 10 years teaching college English, French, and Italian plus a 22-year career in jazz piano.

Since 2002 his work has been in over 50 shows and publications of his photography in the US and abroad, including Paris, Barcelona, Rome, and Budapest. It has been published in the US, Belgium, France and India, and he has received numerous awards. His 2019 mostly color landscape book focusing on remarkable geology, Earthforms: Intimate Portraits of Our Planet, received enthusiastic reviews plus the prestigious 2019 Nautilus Gold Award for Art and Photography, and was cover feature of the June, 2019, issue of Natural History Magazine. His work is currently collected by the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center of Brooklyn. Since 2022 his work has been featured on-line in The Eye of Photography, brutjournal.com, Photo Independent (exhibition), Shades of Grey, and Inspirational Art, and published in The Hand, Shots, and Spotlight (Circle Foundation for the Arts.)

His fourth book Faces in the Rocks: Beyond Landscape to Psycho-Geological Photography proposes a new approach to nature photography. Rather than focusing on iconic places and their lighting, Faces in the Rocks reconsiders the act of perception: how our unconscious inventory of images projects onto and configures the apparent “chaos” of rock and ice formations into meaningful abstractions and intelligible figurations. The resulting highly acclaimed images—by the artist’s own admission—exceed the limits of his imagination, and allow him to feel at home in the wilderness.

Simpson lives in Union, NJ.