Artist Bio

Fine art photographer JW Johnston resists creative limitations. His work ranges from representational natural landscapes to abstracts of form and texture. Johnston’s newest, most autobiographical, project - Home Body - examines imprints of time and family on his boyhood home in Whitney Point, NY.  Home Body’s gallery debut is at the Earlville Opera House on September 23.

 Johnston’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at Orazio Salati Study & Gallery and Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts, both in Binghamton, NY.  Other exhibitions include: two Southern Tier Biennials, Olean, NY, and PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, VT.  Johnston’s photographs have appeared in Black & White and Outdoor Photographer magazines.   His prints are held in private and institutional collections.  

 Johnston left a successful broadcast journalism career of nearly 20 years to become a photographer.  He has been an adjunct photography instructor at SUNY Broome Community College, Binghamton, NY, since 2005. He also conducts independent workshops. 

Artist Statement

This is my home and I wear it like skin. This is where casual conversation provides sustenance, where triumphs are celebrated, failures endured, where my father died despite my attempts to resuscitate him, and where I once shared an observation with my mother before remembering she had died a week earlier.

Evidence of my parents’ lives is everywhere: from my father’s fading notes and carpentry calculations on cracked-paint walls to my mother’s now mud-encrusted canning jars on the cellar’s dirt floor. Cleaning up the evidence would erase some of my parents’ story - my story, too. I yearn for the illusion of permanence. I am all too aware that life is ephemeral.

We all experience the passage and ravages of time. No matter one’s race, religion, ideology, or status, we all die. People we love die. We mourn, cope, and seek comfort in individual ways. Home Body is one way I cope. I memorialize as caretaker, curator, son.

In Home Body, I explore imprints of time and family on my boyhood home - and on me. This 120-year-old house in a small upstate New York village has been the family home since 1960. My parents raised my sister and me here. I lived elsewhere for two decades. In 2003, my wife and I moved back in.