Zack was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1992. From a young age, he has held a deep interest in people and a desire to understand them as individuals. Growing up with a special needs younger brother, he learned early on that it is often the marginalized who is the most authentic and whose story is most worth telling. A fascination for the individual and their story naturally led to his pursuit of a degree in Sociology at Kansas State University. Although he always held a deep love of humanitarian and conflict photography as a kid, he never considered his own capacity to capture this category of dramatic imagery. Growing up, he can remember going to the local bookstore and sitting for hours paging through the raw, honest images of documentary photography books and realizing for the first time the power of sincere vulnerability. It wasn’t until after graduation that his passion for photography was fully realized while serving in the Peace Corps in Uganda from June 2016 through March 2017. Armed with only a refurbished prosumer camera and a “semi” reliable motorcycle, he traveled through Southwestern Uganda doing life with authentic, amiable individuals and trying his best to transpose their stories into an image. Zack believes that we often live such fast-paced lives that we forget to see the people around us. Whether it’s freeze-framing an otherwise forgotten moment or capturing that split-second instant of an individual lowering his wall, he strives to create a body of work that grants us an opportunity to slow down and truly “see” each other.
Check out some of Zack’s work:
MFM 