Sam Jones is an American photographer and director whose portraits of U.S. President Barack Obama, Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Bob Dylan, Kristen Stewart, Robert Downey Jr., Amy Adams, and Jack Nicholson have appeared on the covers of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, Time, Entertainment Weekly and Men's Journal.[1]
His photos have received awards from American Photography and an Eisie award from Communication Arts and Life magazine, and his image for the cover of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was published in "The Greatest Album Covers of All Time".[citation needed] His collection of candid celebrity portraiture, The Here And Now: The Photographs of Sam Jones, was published by HarperCollins. Other published works include Non-Fiction, a collection of cinematic portraiture, and Some Where Else, a photographic book and musical collaboration with musician Blake Mills.
Jones has created national commercials for Skype, Sonos, Canon, Target, Dove and others. In 2011, Jones won MTV's music video of the year for Foo Fighters "Walk". He has directed videos for Mumford and Sons, Tom Petty, John Mayer, and many others. He also directed the multi-award-winning interactive video for Cold War Kids' "I've Seen Enough". He won the IAA Responsibility Award for his AD Council "Everyone Knows" PSA.
In 2013 Jones launched Off Camera with Sam Jones on DirecTV's Audience Network, which ran for 217 episodes, through 2019. Off Camera was an hour long show featuring long-form conversational interviews with artists, actors, and musicians such as Robert Downey Jr., Sarah Silverman, Dave Grohl, Laura Dern, Tony Hawk, Matt Damon and Will Ferrell.[citation needed]
In 2014, Jones directed the feature length Showtime documentary Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued, a film that reexamines Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes and documents new recordings of lost Dylan lyrics by Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford and others in Capitol Records Studios. The film features Bob Dylan as narrator, and documents the collaboration between contemporary musical artists and a 26-year-old Bob Dylan. Jones's other documentary work includes I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco.[2][3][4]
Jones has also worked in television, directing episodes of three Bill Lawrence-created shows: Cougar Town, Ted Lasso and Bad Monkey, Music Box, Smartless: On the Road, and the documentary Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off.
Selected works
edit- Jones, Sam (2007). The Here And Now: The Photographs of Sam Jones. New York: HarperEntertainment. ISBN 978-0-06-134812-9.
- Jones, Sam (2015). Some Where Else. Santa Monica, CA: Beware Doll. ISBN 978-0-692-35344-8.
References
edit- ^ "Sam Jones: Photographer of the Super-Famous". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2018-06-25.
- ^ "Sam Jones, Wilco Documentarian". Pitchfork. Retrieved 2018-06-25.
- ^ "What Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes Can Teach Us". Esquire. Retrieved 2018-06-25.
- ^ "Fire Down Below: Revisiting The Basement Tapes with Sam Jones". Musicfilmweb. Retrieved 2018-06-25.