A Bit about Jon Michael Riley: Reinventing myself came out of both a necessity & desire to do something different. After a successful career as a professional New York photographer doing location & studio work, our family relocated to Asheville, NC, a most unlikely place to do what we had been doing. For one thing, the local photographer community basically circled the wagons with loaded guns. Some were surprised when we refused to go after the so-called "local business. We ended up working for clients I had been shooting for * Coca-Cola * Audi * AT&T, etc.-- & began an amicable working relationship with ad agencies in Greenville, SC, as well as producing stock-photo shoots for Tony Stone Images, which was soon purchased by Getty Images. Our images have been licensed worldwide for many years. In the late 1990s I sustained serious enough back injuries to curtail much of the active photography I was used to. But what I did enjoy doing was making archival art prints of my work, images that had remained unseen for years. A few gallery shows came from this. Along with this was working on the many images I made while in Ireland, our first trip there being in 1998. After another Irish trip or two, Rizzoli responded positively to a presentation I had sent them. The result was a beautiful image book titled The Irish File-Images from a Land of Grace, published in 2002. Catherine, my wife, who was a marvelous producer and editor, was suddenly hit by another bout of MS, which was diagnosed as Secondary Progressive MS, a rare form of the disease that gradually progresses. She has now been in a wheelchair about eight years. For this to happen to such a smart, capable & talented woman is simply tragic. Because of the above situation, I chose to become her caregiver, a job that typically has no set hours & no time off. I have always been "creative" I began to write, something I knew almost nothing about other than I've always read widely, following in the footsteps of my father.

Photography, Ireland, Novel's, Reading,