Jack Rowell

Jack Rowell (born 1955) is an American photographer known for his portraiture of everyday Vermonters.

Early life and education Rowell was born in Tunbridge, Vermont and grew up in Groton and Randolph, Vermont. His father was a logger and his mother worked in a factory. He got a camera for Christmas as a child and began taking pictures, later moving to a Kodak Instamatic. In high school he started shooting on 35mm film and used the school's darkroom to process his images. He got a GED in 1973 and did manual labor jobs while selling photographs to a local newspaper, the White River Valley Herald, getting paid $1 a photo. The newspaper later published his first book, "Tunbridge Fair, Photographs by Jack Rowell" documenting the Tunbridge World's Fair where Rowell's father would sell coffee tables.

Career Rowell's focus as a photographer has been on documenting rural life in Vermont, what Vermont Sunday Magazine called "the Vermont you don't see in Vermont Life magazine." He began taking photographs of the Tunbridge Fair as a teenager using a friend's borrowed Petri camera. He continued to shoot images at the fair throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The exhibit featured audio recordings of their work paired with Rowell's photographs of them.

Equipment Rowell uses a Nikon D810 digital camera. For film cameras he has used Canon and Nikon 35mm cameras as well as a Mamiya camera for medium format and a Sinar camera for his large format portraits.