Carolyn Jones
Through her diverse career and life experiences, Carolyn Jones has found a home using her ability to work with people to help raise awareness for social issues that she feels strongly about. Whether for television, a book, or a documentary film, Carolyn hopes to bring to each a passion for inspiring people to understand one another, and find their own way to help.

To better understand AIDS, motherhood and teenagers she gathered up her camera and tape recorder and traveled to meet people to find answers. In her words: "I collect stories of individuals to help explain to others why we do the things we do. I find that we each have value as human beings and that we are infinitely interesting in our ways of dealing with one another. I've always wanted to celebrate the positive, tell the stories of the optimistic, show us for the best of who we can be. I prefer talking to regular people about life, not famous people, not privileged people, but just the people getting through the days with kindness. I find great richness there and I am endlessly fascinated by what we can learn from one another. Everything I have done has been about telling a story about a person that has gone through something, overcome a hardship, or risen to great personal heights. It's the underlying stories that I care about — who helped along the way, why did someone make the choices they did."

Known internationally for her socially pro-active medium-format photographic portraiture, Jones has worked in a wide variety of film and video formats, primarily in documentary production.

Collaboration with Oxygen Media produced Womenshands, a series of documentary films of women artisans from around the world and broadcast for Oxygen's cable network. Additionally, she produced and directed Women...On Family, a one-hour special that aired on Public Television on Mother's Day, 1993. In 2000, Avon selected her to direct four short documentary films called Women of Enterprise, celebrating the lives of remarkable American businesswomen.

Jones' most widely acclaimed work, Living Proof: Courage in the Face of AIDS, was published in 1994 by Abbeville Press. A series of portraits of American people living with AIDS, the book was accompanied by a traveling exhibition of the portraits that included shows in Tokyo, Berlin, USA, and the United Nations Worlds AIDS Conference. A documentary film inspired by the book screened as a part of MTV World AIDS Day broadcast.

She also earned much praise for her portraits of American mothers and daughters, published in the book The Family of Women: Voices across Generations(1996) by Abbeville Press.

Most recently she has collaborated with The Girl Scouts of the USA to create Every Girl Tells a Story: A Celebration of girls speaking their minds, a book of portraits and interviews of 85 American Girls. Published by Simon & Schuster in March 2002 the book was released in Washington D.C. during Women's history month at the National Building Museum.

In 2001 she was named one of New York State's Women of Excellence. She lives in New York City with her husband and 11 year old daughter.

To see Carolyn's work please visit www.carolynjonesphoto.com