NPN Staff Profile - Marc Ward
Photo Art Gallery Moderator


I left my native Central Florida in the early '70's after the startling invasion of a giant, three-fingered, cartoon rodent named "Mickey". East Tennessee was the destination where I earned the much prized and always lucrative, Bachelor of Studio Arts degree. Was it Voltaire, or maybe Groucho Marx, that said. "The world has no boundaries when you have no marketable skills".... During my college years, I bought a camera to shoot my 3-dimensional & 2D art-work. My roommate, the newspaper editor, saw me with the camera and enlisted me to be the photographer for the college newspaper. It was a lampoon kind of rag... My first forays into the darkroom were to put student's heads onto baby's bodies... Tanks attacking the library... Administration bigwigs in compromising positions. So, my first contact with photography was not some grand artistic mission. It was assignment satire. This was a time, long ago, before the personal computer and Photoshop. I spent hours in the darkroom airbrushing and re-photographing cut-out images... developing and making prints. To this day I still make images, more than just take images.

A few decades later, I'm still exploring the worlds of "no marketable employment skills" with the skills I've learned by never being directly employed.

My composites and Photoshop work have won national and international awards and have been featured in numerous publications and books. My wife and I own Spirit of the Hand Gallery in Dandridge, TN. You can find my work at marcwardphotography.com.

Remember: always use the powers of Photoshop for good, never for evil.

e-mail Marc Ward