Josh Paul

I’ve worked in professional baseball for almost 30 years as a player, a scout, and a coach. Throughout my career, I’ve carried a camera and captured cities and people, ballparks and players, family and friends. Lately, I started shooting my teammates in black and white, both digitally and on film, and it’s transformed the way I think about images and their meaning. I’m fascinated that black dots on a white backdrop — ink & light — can evoke such depth of emotion. It feels counter-intuitive in a world of super-saturated social media scrolling, but with the color stripped away, we see the unvarnished truth.

It’s one thing to see an image on a screen, but it’s a totally different experience when I’m holding a photograph in my hands or flipping through an album. We are so used to scrolling through the endless snapshots and videos on social media that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to hold a physical photograph in our hands and just sit with the image, spend time with it, and feel it with our fingers. Most of the time it’s the face of a loved one we’re holding, and when we slow down and spend some time with that image, our bond grows deeper.

The moments of our lives slip by quickly and quietly. Let’s capture a few of the special ones and hold them in our hands…