Meet Rod Reilly

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

Hi Rod, why did you pursue a creative career?
I learned in my late teens that photography’s ability to stop a single moment in time was an important tool for the way I saw the world. I started from the first time I picked up a camera to photograph people around me to be able to tell a story about why they were important to me. I found photos of people in their environments, people interacting with their environments a creative way to explain what I saw in the world. That idea clicked with me, telling peoples stores with still images. I felt I had a visual skill to illustrate what I saw in the world with photos, and photography was a tremendous creative outlet for me. My professional photography career started with photo illustration for Higher Ed clients, then expanded to corporate industrial clients. I started a freelance photography business in 1984 which continues today. I retired last July after serving as the staff communications photographer for a local Atlanta university for eleven years.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My first full time photo gig out of school was working in the photo department of Georgia Pacific in downtown Atlanta. I was one of three photographers that traveled the US, visiting GP plants to photograph every aspect of the people and products that the comp[any produced. It was a perfect first job as it used all the skills I had learned at university and taught me many more approaches to image making to solve visual problems then I hd learned in school. Most importantly it taught me how to deal with people who I photographed in the mills. Most folks had never been on camera while doing their day to day in a mill or plant environment. The most important aspect of good viewable photography on location is lighting, so I learned in this job how to light a three acre paper mill, or a outdoor portrait at dusk of an employee at a gypsum mine.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I’d certainly take a friend from out of town to see a show at the Fox. A trip along the Atlanta Beltline to see the city’s neighborhoods, and the public art along the trail would be a great way to introduce them to the city. Inman Park and Little Five Points are great areas to see Atlanta culture, and a stop at the Atlanta Botanical Garden would definitely be on the schedule. Rumi’s Kitchen in Colony Square for food and DragonCon is a must see!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
In my senior year at university my photo illustration professor at Rochester Institute of Technology was Charlie Arnold. He had worked in New York for large publications and annual reports during the hay day of his photo career. He took us as a senior trip to visit a half dozen photo studios in downtown NY including the studio of Irving Penn. I was taken with the kinds of world wide projects the NY studio photographers were working on, the stories and messaging their photo work encompassed seemed to me to be the reason for being a photographer. Irving Penn’s book of photos gave me inspiration about photo content and placement of people and things in the cameras frame.

Website: https://circleoffriendsphoto.com