Jim McAuley is a storyteller based out of Berkeley, California. He was born in western Ohio (1989) and moved towards the Pacific by way of a five-year stint in Salt Lake City. His work focuses on combatting the idea of ‘other’ and how format and representation play a role in the assumptions a viewer gleans from a photograph. Lately, the work has honed in on the representation of people often marginalized or ignored by the larger populace. His visual voice focuses at times on all of the four fundamental narrative conflicts: man versus man, man versus self, man versus society and – maybe most discernibly – man versus nature. Jim often finds himself most at home telling stories of tension between people and the landscape in which they are rooted.
Still Here
This work has started to come together in the past few months out of the past several years of working on three separate but linked stories about indigenous food sources and the struggle to protect them from the creep of modern development and colonization. From the northern California coast and the tense conflict for access to abalone and seaweed, to the far northern coast of British Columbia and the fight to save salmon populations there from natural gas development, to the dense timber-rich history of resource conflicts on the islands of Haida Gwaii – many first peoples are fighting in grassroots campaigns to maintain their access to, and the existence of, their food sources.
To view more of Jim McAuley’s work please visit his website.