Like a favorite song, every picture has a story to share. Some resemble still frames, mystically lifted from motion pictures. Some capture moments charged with anticipation, moments on the verge of transformation. Capturing those moments – telling those stories – is my joyous calling.
Abundant experience, passion and ideas are my essentials. Anyone who works with me quickly realizes that I have a big heart and equally robust work ethic, that I’m passionate about music, and adore music people. I believe in magic, and actively cultivate it in my own life. Simply put: I love making pictures.
I’ve been creating visual art all my life, and crafting photographs since I was a teenager. When I opened my own photography studio twenty years ago, I made all kinds of pictures for a wide variety of clients. But in recent years, I’ve come joyfully full circle, back to my first love – photographs for the music industry.
I started photographing performers in music clubs during college, reporting for the university weekly. Concert photography for regional magazines and newspapers soon followed. On request, I began to make pictures with performers at my own studio. Record labels, agencies, media, instrument manufacturers and other music-related entities are now among my clientele. But I also love to work client-direct – with the artists themselves.
I grew up surrounded by all kinds of music – from symphonies to show tunes – and reading wonderful books (the entire OZ series, not just the Wizard). In a lyrical bit of foreshadowing to the work I do in Music City, my older sister -- who played acoustic guitar -- brought home Dylan’s Nashville Skyline record. Encouraged to paint pictures, write stories and play the piano, I was taught to dream.
Perhaps because of these things, my photographs naturally aspire to beauty. Embracing and encouraging what's best in my subjects, my pictures coax those qualities into the light – as mysterious, or revealing, as that light might be. And my images neither show a glossy, artificial version of reality, nor do they depict a brutally direct, unkind world. The photographs I make celebrate what’s beguiling, unique, whimsical or intriguing about my subjects, be it an atmospheric environmental tableau or a penetrating gaze into the face of an artist.
Having worked with advertising agencies and graphic design firms crafting photographs to illustrate ads, I've learned how to create pictures that sell. When working within the music industry, those sensibilities are fused with a deep, authentic love for the music my subjects make. As both an experienced photographer and passionate music fan, I've found the perfect marriage of art and commerce: I create compelling images that help market musicians and their music.
Beyond the music industry, I work in other areas of the arts, with dance troupes and theatre ensembles, magazine editors and book publishers, and I collaborate on commercial assignments with graphic design studios and ad agencies. I continue to make fine art photographic assemblages, including traditional black and white film images, processed – as time allows – in my own darkroom and hand-tinted with traditional oil-colors. I accept select personal portrait projects. Periodically I teach and lecture, leading workshops in photographic lighting techniques and portraiture; and I write for publication.
Please email me at deone@deonejahnke.com for more information about any of the things I do, or to discover how we can work together.
All of the photographs I create are copyrighted works. Please enjoy them. While many are available for licensing for additional uses, none may be ‘borrowed’ or ‘saved’ for any reason without my express permission and a negotiated use fee. Remember to respect the value of personal creativity and to honor the artist’s copyright, in this and every context.