OCALA, FL — Chelsea Art Center (CAC), Ocala’s latest addition to its burgeoning art and culture scene, is hosting an exhibition of selected photographs of photographer and author John Elliott, throughout the month of December, 2023. The CAC is both an arts education school and art gallery.

John Elliott is a master photographer with more than five decades invested in the medium.  He began his professional career at age 14 as a newspaper photojournalist in Coral Gables, Florida in the early '70s. Since then he has handled a wide variety of international assignments and projects as a U.S. Army photographer and magazine photojournalist before embarking on a career in public diplomacy as a Foreign Service officer and bureau spokesperson with the U.S. State Department.

With a Fine Arts degree in Photography from Ohio University, and subsequent foreign language studies at Harvard University, he became a photography instructor at the Art Institute of Atlanta in the '80s, a corporate communications media manager in the '90s, and a senior principal in an Atlanta, Georgia advertising agency in the 2000s. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in Latin America, the Middle East, and throughout the USA since 1973. 

The CAC exhibition will feature 40 photographs selected out of more than 100 from two of Elliott’s ongoing fine arts series, “The Human Pulse,” and “Walls/Spaces.” With highly detailed film- and digitally-sourced images from 32 countries, a key message of the series is a universality of human experiences throughout unique world cultures.

“I seek dynamic or interrelated movements of people within the depth of physical space,” says Elliott of “The Human Pulse” series. “There is the movement of freedom and exuberance, which adds spontaneity or joy to the captured moment; conversely in other images, there may be a sense of sober reflection by the subject,” he noted.

Elliott began working on his “Walls/Spaces” series while living in Venezuela in 1980. Many of the images are mysterious–even cryptic, and often uncover beauty embedded in the grittier seams of life. He notes that the scenes “provide cultural and geographical referents and offer important, timeless, and transcendent metaphors.”
CAC owner Barbara Fife, Ed.D. says of Elliott’s work, “He captures the human spirit and
spectrum of emotion in ‘The Human Pulse’ series. Each photo tells an engaging story and the
location is often surprising and incidental to the expressive shared moment. ‘Walls/Spaces’ is a
captivating collection and demonstrates an artist’s way of seeing that elevates his photos of
commonplace scenes to memorable works of art.”

Elliott will also be leading a course in photography at the CAC on December 6, which will teach "the art of seeing" through what he says will be, “An enjoyable and information-packed creative discovery, from the basics to advanced techniques, and incorporating impactful images.”

In 2021, shortly after retiring to Ocala, Elliott founded the Ocala Photography Group (www.meetup.com/ocala-photography), which he currently directs. A father of two daughters, he is active as a mentor in the public schools, is an exhibiting member of the Marion Cultural Alliance, and his books are for sale at Ocala’s Brick City Art Gallery. Many of his photographs can be viewed at www.thehumanpulse.com, which also has blog stories of some of his experiences.

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PHOTOS LINKS
1. Downloadable and captioned images from “The Human Pulse”: https://www.behance.net/gallery/9066805/The-Human-Pulse-by-John-D-Elliott
2. Downloadable and captioned images from “Walls/Spaces”:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/8436065/Walls-and-Spaces-by-John-D-Elliott