Hester

‘Here’s What I’ve Seen’: The Photos of My Morning Jacket’s Jim James

To see more of Jim’s photography, check out @removador on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

Jim James (@removador) is tired of talking. “I feel like in today’s world, everybody wants to talk and nobody wants to listen. So I’m trying to be a better listener,” he says. His preferred method of communication is (no surprises here) music. But if he had to pick a close second, the My Morning Jacket frontman would go with photography.

“You know, I’m lucky enough to get to travel the world and see all these really cool things,” he says. “And I feel like this is the perfect way for me to be able to communicate and say, ‘Here’s what I’ve seen,’ or ‘Here’s what I’m feeling,’ without any words.”

Right now, he’s feeling a Super Mario Bros.-themed totem pole, which is staring back at him on the waterfront in Seattle. But that pole could just as easily be an old faded record with a ripped sleeve, or the inside of a piano, or a dusty room with light shining through the curtains.

Jim is the first to point out that he isn’t trying to make a career of taking pictures (“For me, it’s always been more of a fleeting pleasure. I just see something and take a picture of it, and it’s just a fun way to be artistic”). But when you shoot photos over a long period of time, patterns start to develop and inform other creative avenues. That’s how he came up with the cover of his band’s latest record, The Waterfall.

It all came together during a trip to Portland, Oregon, when My Morning Jacket was mixing their album. Not only did Jim visit Multnomah Falls while he was there, he had also written a song for the record called “In Its Infancy (The Waterfall).” The next logical move was to just use a waterfall photo as the cover art — which was easy since the singer had already built up his own collection.

“I don’t even know why, but I just kind of got obsessed with old black-and-white pictures of waterfalls,” he says.

Sifting through used pictures, you begin to wonder where they originated and why no one claimed them. Jim had been thinking about this a lot recently, after the death of his great aunt.

“If somebody passes away, and they were alone or didn’t have any family or anything, all those photos just eventually go to the Goodwill or go in the trash or some antique collector,” says Jim. “But it’s kind of cool because it’s like, there’s another life for all those things, and people like me kind of walk through an antique mall and get into it, you know?”

Turns out taking photos isn’t the only way to communicate without talking — so is finding them.