Kristian Thacker

Marion County

Photography

B.F.A. Photography (Shepherd University)

Website

I am editorial and commercial photographer based out of Fairmont, WV. My clients include: NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, VOX Media, et al.

Biography

I was born in West Virginia and grew up in the shade of a steep hillside in the Ohio River Valley. Light was fleeting. Even on summer days the sun didn’t crest the hilltop until ten in the morning, and fell below the tree line by four in the afternoon. My home allowed me to see the ways in which light creates opportunities.

I started to capture these moments when I was young. My first camera was a hand-me-down Kodak Instamatic that had belonged to my late grandmother. A Polaroid replaced the Kodak, and by high school I was experimenting with my dad’s Canon single-lens reflex. With money scraped together from odd jobs, I was able to buy film and have it processed at the pharmacy in town. My earliest inspiration came from the photographs I saw in Rolling Stone, National Geographic, and copies of Time magazine my grandmother gave me.

I grew older, I went to school, and I worked. I learned to make images with different tools in different places. I’m still learning, and I hope that I will always be learning. While many things have changed since those years in the woods of my childhood, much has remained the same.

Other Creative Skills

Photography, Video

Kristian Thacker's Work

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