Meet Jerrold Mobley: Photographic Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jerrold Mobley and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jerrold, how has your background shaped the person you are today?
I was born and raised in a small community on the southwest side of Atlanta called Adamsville, making me somewhat of unicorn amongst all those that have descended upon my city in recent years. But my family roots are also tied to farming and a little town called Deep Step, a couple of hours outside the city. This combination of influences and values created a very unique upbringing that has had significant impacts on the man I’m becoming. Growing up in the urban epicenter of American civil rights, raised by a family accustomed to a rural existence solely dependent on the work of their hands, merged two beautifully idealistic cultures into one. The result was a modern household (and neighborhood) of like-minded people who valued connection over everything. Connection to spirituality, connection to the spaces they occupied and, most importantly, connection to each other. But hidden at the center of all of this character and culture was the idea of creation, and it’s been a defining force in my life. Whether it’s planting a garden or planting a seed of equality in society, your mind and soul create a thought that becomes a thing your hands bring into existence. And if you’re lucky, that thing makes life better for those around you. It’s the most powerful reaction in the world and produced a desire in me to explore and exhaust my gifts and talents, using them in a way that would honor and preserve our individual and collective humanity. My visions and storytelling through photography have become the primary tool of expressing this desire. 

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My art is a relationship. Not long ago, I completely walked away from photography and didn’t pick up a camera for years. But a conversation with a friend and fellow photographer, John Stephens, gave me something we all need from time to time: a fresh perspective. He listened to my gripes about being unfulfilled, imposter syndrome woes, and a general malaise about attempting to please my clients and myself with my work. John responded that the art of photography is a relationship, not unlike any other we have with the people or places or things that fill our days. There are ebbs and flows, highs and lows, but you don’t abandon the things you love. You work at it, redefine the relationship, and push through. Since that conversation, I’ve slowly and comfortably began to re-emerge as a different type of creative, reborn through a kind of trial by fire. Resurgens, much like the city I love. I’ve began a long journey of personal realignment surrounding my practice of the art and science that is photography, and how this medium engages individuals. How this art has literally changed our social fabric and how we interact with each other. How we feel. How we remember. How we view others and ourselves. My work always finds its way back to a desire for documenting the fragile and fleeting moments of our contemporary world via my own narrative, whether through traditional fine art approaches, digital and physical collaging of images, or more antiquated, abstract processes such as parsemage. My commissioned work leans toward being technically simple, but somewhat timeless in that simplicity, and those same values tend to spill over into my personal artwork. I seek to elevate the most common infatuation with photography, the perfection of freezing time, into an unavoidable clash between the presentation of a visual thought, and the reality of that thing we seek to preserve.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Monday Gallery Crawl: We’ll kick the week off with breakfeast at Gocha’s Breakfast Bar. I’m thinking shrimp and grits… maybe a couple of Mimosas. After a quick coffee run to Buzz Coffee and Wine Bar, we’ll begin our gallery crawl through Atlanta, starting with Hammonds House Museum. We’ll travel a few blocks up to Atlanta University Center and take in the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, as well as the Clark Atlanta University Museum. From there, we’ll swing around to Peters Street Station in Castleberry, followed by a quick detour to the Marcia Wood Gallery. We should be good and hungry by then, so we’ll go a block or two down to No Mas Cantina for a late lunch and mojitos. With new energy, we’ll pick up our crawl at Zucot Gallery, then make a pilgrimage to the hidden gem that is WhiteSpace Gallery, off Edgewood. Over to the westside now to take in the Atlanta Contemporary, followed by the Westside Cultural Arts Center, then across the street to Kai Lin Art. We’ll double back to Sandra Hudson Gallery and call it a day. Our mojitos would have worn off by then, so we’ll stop by Flip Burger Boutique for beers and burgers before heading home. Tuesday Spa Day: After a full day of crawling some of the best art galleries in Atlanta, our Tuesday should be a bit more chill. We’ll begin with a trip to Arden’s Garden for a light, liquid breakfast of smoothies as we prepare for our Spa Day. Our early sessions will begin at BlueMedSpa, including hydration treatments and facials. Having not had a proper breakfast, we’ll be primed for an amazing brunch at Bread and Butterfly (including more mimosas). We’ll then travel back to southwest Atlanta for wraps, massages, and feet/hand treatments at Celestial Spa. Fully relaxed and pampered, we’ll head home and order-in some Thai from Top Spice. Wednesday Museum Run: Rested and refreshed we’ll gear up to tackle the larger museums in the city, which will take the entire day. We’ll get a hearty breakfast from The Beautiful Restaurant to get us energized and head straight to The Fernbank Museum of Natural History. We’ll break for an amazing lunch at South City Kitchen (midtown location) which will put us just a few blocks away from the High Museum of Art. We’ll spend the remainder of the day there, making sure to leave enough time to stroll across the street to MODA. Completely full of culture, but empty in the stomach area, we’ll travel just a few more blocks down to Tuk Tuk Thai Food Loft, where we’ll order the entire small plate menu and enjoy amazing cocktails to wind down the evening. “Woke” Thursday: It would be blasphemous to visit Atlanta and not absorb some of its rich Civil Rights history, so Thursday will be all about stepping up our “wokeness.” We’ll begin with coffee and small bites in the morning at Refuge Coffee on Historic “Sweet Auburn” Avenue. If we’re lucky, we can snag a quick meeting with Gene Kansas and tour the amazing Constellations building he and his team lovingly restored. We’ll stop in the APEX Musuem to take in more history, do a quick walk around the block to view more historic African American sites before heading over to the King Center. We should take the full tour, passing the King childhood home, the crypt, and other points of interest nearby. By the end of this tour, we’ll be ready for a good lunch. A few blocks over, we’ll enter the Krog Street Market and sample some of the amazing food from the vendors. Maybe a Richard’s Southern Fried Chicken Sandwich, or some slices from Varuna Napoli, making certain to tuck some Xocoatl chocolate in our pockets for later. Next up, we take on the phenomenal National Center for Civil and Human Rights, taking a few minutes afterwards to relax in Centennial park, eat our Xocoatl chocolate and reflect on the things we’ve absorbed so far. We’ll gather ourselves and head over to the Herndon Home Museum for a tour, and also walk the grounds of Morris Brown College next door. This will be the first stop on our next, and last, experience of the day: a walking tour of the collective campuses of the Atlanta University Center, the largest consortium of HBCU’s in the nation. We’ll finish our day with dinner and drinks at a restaurant in the area synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement AND good fried chicken: Pashcal’s. (We’ll also stash a plate from Busy Bee Café in the trunk, so we can do a full-fledged, fried chicken taste-test at home later.) Friday Shopping Fun – Nothing like retail therapy and people watching to round out a good trip, so Friday is all about shopping. We rise early and head to the very edge of 285 to enjoy the Atlanta institution that is a Flying Biscuit breakfast. We drive all the way to the Sandy Springs location because it places us just a few minutes away from Perimeter Mall, arguable the best shopping mall in the city. Once we’ve exhausted the offerings there, we should be primed for a good lunch. A quick trip up 400 and we are at the illustrious Buckhead Village District, home to some of the most luxurious brands available in the city. We have a decadent lunch at Le Bilboquet as we people-watch, followed up by a quick walk through the Village. From there, we head up Peachtree to the best indoor people-watching scene in the city: Lenox Square mall. We also make a stop by Phipps Plaza across the street because, why not? From here, it’s on to the REAL shopping experiences of the city – the spots featuring local goods that truly represent the best Atlanta has to offer. It’s a mad dash from neighborhood to neighborhood, shop to shop. Westside Provisions District, Beehive in the Edgewood Shopping District, Village Market and Sustainable Goods at Ponce City Market, Moods Music and all the quirky stops around Little Five Points, the Ke’nekt and the shops in Westview, and all the new pop-ups in the Westside Village along Marietta Blvd. We’ll take a break, drop our bags off at home and freshen up a bit. It’s dinner time, but it’s also a Friday night in Atlanta, so we set out for some fun. The nightlife scene for my age bracket has changed quite a bit, and almost all of the spots I enjoyed have disappeared. But not to be outdone, we start with dinner and drinks at Virgil’s Gullah Kitchen and Bar. Hopefully DJ Toni K is spinning that night, and we get things started right. From there, we simply play it by ear. Maybe we grab drinks at Café Circa and walk the bars on Edgewood Avenue to see what the “young folks” are doing. Maybe cross over 75/85 to see if the BQE is popping. Is the vibe at Booglou right tonight? Is my guest ready for the experience that is MJQ? Or maybe we’re looking for a more sophisticated feel for the evening, and end up lounging at the den of Parlor in Castleberry Hills. Or we could do a full 180 and end up throwing ones to trap music at the Blue Flame. It’s Atlanta, you never know. (smile)

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My wife Cetu’ra, my mother Patti, and the entire Poole family have been constant creative and entrepreneurial inspirations along my journey, so I would have to begin there. Along those same lines, encountering the work of Gordon Parks early in life was instrumental in how I viewed photos and their potential. It’s impossible to gauge the impact he and other pioneers had on young African-American creatives. But Atlanta is home to such a supportive arts community, there are so many extraordinary, everyday people that have supported me throughout my becoming. My lifelong role model and photographic mentor, Jonathan Kelly. My creative twin, Jonetta Moyo of My Inspiration Studio. My brother and artistic inspiration, John Stephens of JAS Photo. My unofficial photography group partners, Ayesha Lakes of Phoartgraphy and concert photographer Gudrun Hughes. And I can’t ignore the visual inspiration of my forever muse, Shonte Press. The tireless work of the National Black Arts Festival has been a constant voice and vehicle for African-American creatives like me, as well as the work of the Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta’s Historic West End. The Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs has also remained a vigilant defender of the arts for Atlanta, thanks to the work of Camille Russell Love. I’ve gained great inspiration and respect for the art of photography through the very deliberate collecting of photography by the High Museum, and the subsequent programming created around it’s collection over the years. Most recently, my involvement with Atlanta Celebrates Photography, the Atlanta Photography Group, and the Atlanta Contemporary arts center have become indispensable pieces of my creative life.

Website: www.pixelegant.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/pixelegant
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jerroldmobley/

Image Credits
All images by Jerrold Mobley for Pixelegant.