The Artist

The ocean is my therapy, my sanity, my grounding. It has been since I was a teenager, and it still is.

Joseph Barber is a photographer from Lakewood, California, who has lived in San Clemente for the last few years. His fine art work is made along the coast from Huntington Beach to San Clemente and in the deserts and mountains of California, Arizona, Canada, and beyond, and it keeps returning to the same subject: light, and the patience it takes to be there when it arrives.

He is building Portrait of the Pacific, an ongoing body of work that includes Pacific Portraits, a series of people whose lives are tied to the ocean, made on film and digital. Prints are made to museum archival standards. Each edition is limited in number and retired when it is complete. Made slow. Printed large.

Barber grew up playing baseball, as a pitcher and second baseman, and still plays today. He started surfing and skateboarding as a teenager and surfs almost every day — the ocean has been his therapy, his sanity, and his grounding ever since. He studied at Long Beach City College and Cal State Long Beach, then attended ministry school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later lived in London and the UK for two years, before returning to California and moving into photography full time. He has been a professional photographer for more than fifteen years, and alongside the fine art work he photographs weddings, real estate and personal branding for clients across Newport Beach and Coastal Orange County. He also works with the Balboa Island Museum.

In his words

I grew up in Lakewood, and for me the California coast has always felt like home. It’s part of why I stayed, and part of why my work looks the way it does.

Surfing found me as a teenager, the same time as skateboarding, and it never let go. To this day it’s the closest thing I have to meditation — my therapy, my sanity, my grounding, almost every single day.

I shot my first wedding over fifteen years ago, terrified and wildly underprepared. What I discovered was that I loved it. Not the posed moments — the real ones.

The photographers I admire include Ernst Haas, Gregory Heisler and Stephan Vanfleteren.

When I’m not working for clients, I’m either out on the water, on a ball field, or chasing the kind of light that makes landscape photographers lose their minds. That part never stops.

Contact

Joseph Barber Photography
Serving Newport Beach and Coastal Orange County
joseph@josephbphoto.com
(949) 531-8405