Artist Portfolio: Jim McGuire

About Jim McGuire

While in the Air Force in the 1960s, McGuire was asked to photograph Vietnamese villages as he hung out of a single engine aircraft. In old army tents, he learned the use of a darkroom making black and white prints that were used by helicopter pilots to plan missions. Upon returning stateside, McGuire worked with fashion photographer John Foote in his New York studio. McGuire’s strongest photographic influence became portrait photographer Irving Penn. His honest approach of taking powerful images of working people inspired McGuire to hand paint a canvas that looked like Penn’s backdrops. This use of the hand-painted canvas backdrop is what resulted in his well-known series of Nashville Portraits.

A well-known music manager saw an exhibit of his work in NYC and invited him to come to Nashville and shoot photographs of singer Tracy Nelson. He had the opportunity to take black & white photographs of band musicians John Hartford, Vassar Clements and Tut Taylor; and his move to Nashville was imminent.

For the past forty years, Jim McGuire has met, befriended, and taken photographs of such country icons as Marty Robbins, Chet Atkins, Waylon Jennings, and Bill Monroe. Some 650 album covers later, McGuire is still taking photos of today’s stars and enjoying the music.