Hello.

I have been a photographer nearly my entire life, since maybe age 6 when my parents gave me a Kodak Instamatic X-15 camera and funded my film, flash cube, and Fotomat costs. Then came a junior high school photo club, yearbook photography using our teacher's Nikkormat, and suddenly a full-time after-school job as a photographer and writer with a local newspaper when I was still in high school. I studied both photojournalism and computer science in college, and had a brief but intense period as a photojournalist, editor, and writer at daily newspapers and other publications before accepting that technology would be my vocation, and photography, my avocation.

Currently based in San Francisco, I now shoot photos solely for my own projects. I still consider myself a photojournalist and pursue occasional self-assignments around the city - at street level, wherever I can go by foot, bike, or on transit, and in explorations of the world outside SF.

Through words, pictures, and graphic arts prints, I try to capture and report about the world as I've experienced it, while supporting causes I can't ignore - especially the homelessness crisis and the pursuit of social justice.

For an awfully long time, I believed that only newspaper columnists and editors write in the first person — because their lives are bigger and their minds wiser than ours.

Recently, I 
figured out something I should have realized long ago:

Every photo I have ever made is a story told by me in the first person.
_I_ saw something that existed in the real world, something that actually happened.
_I_ was so deeply immersed in the living world that I could steal an image of what I found there to take home… keep… publish... or show to you.

-- Jim Cruz-Youll