Jack was born and raised in San Francisco and still lives there. Rich in any other part of the world, in that city he was on food stamps. He went to an Arts High School for Film and Video and almost failed out due to a severe two year long bout of alcoholism. As he started to recover from that and the self-involvement that's an integral part of any addiction, he started to realize how beautiful the world around him was. With no formal training, he started to use a camera to document what he found beautiful. In 2007 he crashed his bicycle, suffering a major head injury that left him amnesiac and maimed. Due to reconstructive surgery and a titanium plate he looks as normal as ever did, but the intercranial bleeding has left him with verbal difficulty and a poor short term memory. Now he really is all about Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment." It's all he has.

I take pictures because it feels good. I like it. I feel like this world is so beautiful, but the human mind, being a highly specialized survival computer, will look at it and see threats and temptations everywhere. My work is about seeing the world without those projections and appreciating it for what's actually there, instead of just the responses of obsolete survival mechanisms. I take pictures because I don't personally think I am capable of creating something more beautiful than what already exists.

I am all about process. I don't develop my own negatives, I don't print my own images. The technological side of it does not fascinate me even for a moment. I could be out taking more pictures in the time I would spend doing those things. I call myself an "artist" because it's a convenient label. In reality, all I'm doing is trying to focus light to burn some silver halide in a pretty way. At the very best what I do is compress four dimensions into two in a powerful way. The best, my favorite, is when I can (rarely) make the medium transcend itself and show four dimensions in two. Like, the texture of decay on something. There's depth and time on a flat surface.

I used to think that I saw things uniquely, because I would try to communicate with words the glory of glowing dust motes floating in the air in an otherwise darkened room, or the delight of the encroachment of rust upon a fencepost by the beach. However, words were inadequate, and also it slowly came to me that these experiences were baselines; something we all knew in childhood but are forgotten now. We have cynical appraisal and endless worry in adulthood instead of that boundless, timeless wonder that I remember. I want to get back there. To an extent I can sometimes, normally with a camera around my neck. The images are the residue of these walks and moments.