About

Jamey Lord is a NY based photographer who studied at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. He currently resides in Upper Greenwood Lake, New Jersey.

First Aid

In my early twenties I started collecting instruction manuals, how-to books, and first aid study guides from the 1940’s and 1950’s. I found a certain beauty in the idea that something basic could yield such ambiguous and potent images. The vernacular photographs found inside these books are considered artless to most, but I believe on the contrary. Since the photographs main purpose was not to create art but to inform and educate, the outcome inadvertently creates opportunity for other interpretation. I wanted to reproduce these images with an emphasis on what I found particularly unsettling about them.

Medical professionals are people that we trust even though they are initially strangers to us. We openly expose and submit ourselves and are left at the mercy of their intentions. It is though this uneasiness and uncertainty that I found the inspiration and thread to pursue in this work. Through trying to recreate these illustrations of circumstances familiar to us all, we also reveal the potential of something less than pure.

In order to make my prints appear period specific I developed a printing process which involved finding ways of degrading the images to make them look more like newsprint and capture a nostalgic appeal. Through these images, I hoped to expose my own apprehensions towards what’s considered to be safe and controlled environments.

Inside Out

Inside Out is a work in progress that continues to build where First Aid left off. In this series I used a simple collage technique which combines composites of original photographs with material from my vintage photograph and manual collections.