The tools she needed to build a multiple-decade career as an innovative and intrepid photographer started when Jennie Jones was growing up in the Denver area, where she often camped in the Rocky Mountains. Her father also fostered her love of the outdoors by teaching his young daughter how to hunt, fish, skeet-shoot and fix anything.
“I was a tomboy, obviously,” Jennie recalls with a laugh.
She loved art as a child, and at eleven, studied at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. She went to Colorado College and Northwestern, where she also studied art and earned her B.A. in Art History. Her father gave her a camera when she attended Colorado College.
When she and her husband, Trevor, transferred to Cleveland in 1978, she took a professional interest in photography. During the early 1980s, she studied photography at the Cleveland Institute of Art and took night courses at the Cleveland Photographic society. She spent a summer studying architectural photography at the Maine Photographic Workshop.
She also attended many Santa Fe Photographic Workshops to master black and white digital printing with George DeWolfe, and she studied with famed American photographer Joyce Tenneson in France.
“When we moved here, everybody was complaining about Cleveland,” Jennie remembers. “I thought Cleveland was great. What’s wrong with everybody? I went to the Under Cover bookstore on Warrensville Road. The owner said, ‘Jennie, you don’t want to do pretty pictures. You want to do Cleveland. Nobody photographs Cleveland.’ Okay. Cleveland is going to be my subject matter.”
Jennie turned her attention to photographing the architectural wonders she saw in Cleveland. In 1988, the Terminal Tower sent out a public competition to photograph upgrading the site. It was a four-year project. Margaret-Bourke-White had photographed Terminal Tower in 1930. Jennie thought a woman ought to enter this challenge. She bought a Sinar 4 x 5 camera and entered the competition. Her entry photo beat out ten men. Margaret’s brother lived in Cleveland and bought one of Jennie’s pictures!
In 1983, Jennie decided to launch her own studio business, specializing in architectural and urban photography. Her commercial work between 1980 and 2003 featured most of the major building projects in Cleveland, including TRW’s new headquarters, the Old Post Office, Society Center, Jacob’s Field/Gateway, and the Stokes Wing of the Cleveland Public Library.
Jennie had also fallen in love with the industrial landscape of the Flats. Her fearlessness from clambering around on mountains paid off handsomely when it enabled her to climb bridges over the Cuyahoga River or the construction of new skyscrapers.
“I explain myself through my photography, so I did a lot of my work for myself,” Jennie says. “I fell in love with Cleveland, but I wasn’t paid to do a lot of the historic photography. I just asked permission. I got to know a lot of the people working on the bridges, so if I wanted to get up on a bridge to get some shots, they would take me up, and I would pay them with copies of the photo.”
Jennie photographed shots that no one else ever recorded and in many cases no longer can because of changes in the city’s landscape. Well into her 70s, she continued to grab her camera and venture out in a blizzard at 2 am to photograph the Cuyahoga, climb a 60-foot ladder to shoot the lobby of the Terminal Tower, capture Jacob’s Field from the roof of Key Tower or clutch the side of a sailboat to photograph Lake Erie freighters.
“Jennie’s photos of Cleveland’s buildings, hospitals, neighborhoods, and the landmarks, are iconic and capture their essence,” says Trudy Weisenberger, retired University Hospitals art collection curator. “When I started the collection, I included a number of her photographs because I felt people in the hospital that are under stress need to be uplifted, and it was my hope that they would react positively to imagery they could recognize.”
Jennie’s list of awards and exhibitions is longer than her beloved vertical lift and swing bridges in the Flats. In 2007, her Rowfant Club portfolio was acquired by The Cleveland Museum of Art for its permanent photographic collection. Her work is represented by The Bonfoey Gallery in Cleveland.
Her books featuring many of Cleveland’s architectural and industrial wonders and portraits of Clevelanders include Cleveland: A Celebration of Color, A Paradise in the City: The Cleveland Botanical Garden, A Place Apart: Bratenahl, Ohio, The Cleveland Museum of Art: A Portrait, and Cleveland Inside Outside, a coffee table monograph representing 30 years of her photography.
“I love Cleveland, so I tried to show Clevelanders what wonders and architectural gems they really have here.”