JonesAmericana

My Grandfather, Ralph A. Jones, was a photographer. During WWII he served with a photo-recognizance squad called the Flying Squirrels and growing up I recall listening to stories of South America as he would show us 8 by 10 prints that he had swapped with others on his squad, but it wasn’t until my Grandfather handed me tins of aging family slides that I realized my grandfather had just not served in the military with camera in hand, he had a story to tell.

To me, his photographs embody a more true America. It's not only my family in these shots, but the images of an entire era of Americana.

I wish I could say that his talent, these slides, propelled my pursuit as a photojournalist at Temple University, but truth is I knew little of his talent during that time. It was during our many sessions of thumbing through his military scrapbooks and these very slides in 2004 that drew us closer together in his final years.

Recently I approached a couple of friends and we set out to marry these family portraits with new fictional short stories. The results maintain an admiration of the great history my grandfather sought to capture, while injecting it with a second look at the frames that his talent captured.

Ian’s writing style is best described as an ink-to-paper simplicity coupled with an unrelenting sense of angst. Born from the pulse of Midwest suburbia his ambition still remains that of the American dream. He runs a modest weblog, iancahill.com, which maintains a small following locally. He is proud and excited for the chance to contribute to JonesAmericana.com in elevating the already powerful imagery of the photography.

Marty Long was thinking about writing one of those overly self aggrandizing biographies which lays out a long list of outlandish and fictional accomplishments. But really, he thinks those are kind of silly. For example, he didn’t come up with the black and white color scheme for dairy cows, so why should he say he did? He shouldn’t, and he won’t. This doesn’t mean he’s not jealous that the actual designer was able to concoct a color scheme for a cow (a cow!) which has elevated such a beastly entity into the hallowed halls of “Americana.” But to assert, in a biographical blurb, that he was the sole creative force behind such a sublime design seems patently ridiculous and intentionally dishonest, even if such an assertion were meant to be offhand and flip. Marty Long lives alone.