PICTURE THIS

Modern technology has made it possible for James Ball to get back into something he’s loved most of his life — photography.
Ball, who lives in Frontenac with his wife, Wanda, recently exhibited some of his photos at the Little Room, and three  of them are now hanging at the Free Spirit Holistic Learning Center in Pittsburg.
“The Little Room was my first gallery showing,” Ball said. “I also hope to have some of my prints at the Parsons Art Walk on June 21, and possibly in some bigger galleries.”
He grew up around Riverton, graduated from Riverton High School, and has lived in the Pittsburg area since 1980. 
“I was about 11 when I got my first camera, and I still have it,” Ball said. “It’s a little plastic box camera, and I think it might still work. In the 1970s I made a living in photography, working for a man who had a screen printing business and a photo studio on the side. In 1972 I went to work at his camera shop in Joplin and learned something about studio work.”
Around 1974 he went to work for Channel 16 TV, Joplin. “That was when it was KUHI,” Ball said. “Back then everything was shot on film, and I did commercial and news photography for them, as well as processing it.”
In 1976 he tried to run his own photography studio. “It was a bad year for photography,” Ball said. “There was the gas crisis and the start of inexpensive photo services at places like Wal-Mart and Sears. In 1976 10,000 photography studios went out of business, and I was one of them.”
So he put photography on the back burner, except for shooting a few family weddings over the years. Ball did other things, including competitive cooking with his barbecue and chili.
“More than anything else, I’d find myself taking pictures of what I was doing,” he said.
The switch to digital photography made it affordable for him to get back into taking pictures. “Now it’s possible to bypass the studio — Photoshop is my new studio,” Ball said. “I don’t have to pay a photo lab to process my photos. You can get images from an inkjet printer that will rival those produced in a photo lab. The digital revolution has brought me back into something I loved when I was younger.”
Ball enjoys doing figure studies, some of them influenced by classic paintings. He uses models, male and female, for his work.
“Some of them are professional, but many are amateurs,” he said. “Some of them want their five minutes of fame, or they want a record of their youthful good looks.”
The models get copies of the photos. “A lot of them want the photos for their portfolios,” said Mrs. Ball.
She is always there with him during photo sessions, helping the models with their make-up and hair, and generally keeping them comfortable. “I make them laugh,” Mrs. Ball said.
For the photos at the Little Room, Ball covered his models with fabric, then asked them to express various emotions through their bodies rather than their faces. “I did very little posing of them,” he said.
That Little Room exhibit focused around “The Art of Strange Behavior,” and Stephen Hoyer, Ph.D., of the Free Spirit Center, was asked to speak at the opening reception.
“Jim’s photos were striking when I saw them,” Hoyer said. “Then Marianne Evans-Lombe suggested that we hang some  art work here, and we thought that would be a good thing to build a sense of community. The photos certainly have been a subject of conversation.”