When I first saw Justin Visnesky’s image on the new Collect.Give offering (benefiting the Sprout Fund in Pittsburgh, PA), it took me right back to my days with a 240 Volvo wagon filled with birthday balloons and made me want to see more.

Justin grew up in Pennsylvania, went to college in Jimmy Stewart’s hometown of Indiana, PA, and now lives in Pittsburgh. “He makes photographs of the simple, quiet times in life; taking the ordinary and making it something more, something for the keeping.” I am featuring two series, Jimmy Stewart Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Sometimes You Just Know. Both are quiet explorations of place and moments.

Justin’s work has been published in a wide variety of online and in print magazines and has been exhibited throughout the US.

“Through the years Indiana (PA) has been something of tremendous importance in my life. It’s true there is something special about the place where you were raised—your hometown. I have found through the years during the times when I’ve been here in Indiana that almost every direction I look, and so many faces I see, immediately cause a picture to be formed of an event, a happening in my life that I remember well … I’ve settled down three thousand miles from Indiana. I’ve traveled to points in the world three times that distance. At times I’ve stayed away several years at a stretch, but I somehow have never felt that I was very far from here … somehow I don’t feel that I have ever been away. “
– Jimmy Stewart

Sometimes You Just Know: In a broad sense, all of my work is an exploration of the ideas of home and origin in an effort to reconcile the divide between my past, present, and future. Specifically, the photographs in the series “Sometimes You Just Know” are an exploration of familiar spaces, inhabited and otherwise. They are a visual documentation of my feelings toward what I know or thought I knew. I’m not interested in freezing time, but freezing a feeling, that feeling you get in your gut when you know something is just right and may never be again.