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Jody Dole Photographs Objects that Catch His Eye

Jody Dole is a Nikon Legend Behind the Lens.

Sticks. Stones. Shells. Bones. Not to mention glass, water and weeds. And, lately, boats. Anything he's interested in, anything that makes him curious. And, of course, anything a client hires him to photograph. All end up in Jody Dole's viewfinder.

His commercial images have appeared in national print advertising campaigns and editorial illustrations; on magazine covers and billboards; and television commercials.

Jody's personal work, which is often used in self-promotion material, stems from a combination of vision—"This will look great!"—and curiosity—"I wonder what this will look like?"

In fact, it was just that combination that launched his career. An art school graduate working in advertising and film production in New York City, he came in contact with a number of photographers and soon began to wonder what he could do with a camera. To find out, he rented a barn in Amagansett, Long Island, and photographed every day for nearly eight months. The subjects of his photographs were the common things he found at the seashore or bought at local flea markets. He shot against his own hand-painted backgrounds and used ScotchChrome 1000, a grainy film that he pushed four or five stops to make the grain even more prominent.

When he took the results to market, a career was born. One of the photos became the cover of the 1989 edition of Graphis Annual. American Photography Annual gave him ten pages. And when he showed the images at a New York City ad agency, the art director, about to begin a major campaign for Smirnoff, handed Jody a bottle of the distiller's vodka and said, "Why don't you experiment and see what you can come up with." What he came up with were photographs that made the Smirnoff campaign a worldwide sensation.