Jay Dickman
Olympus Visionary
& FirstLight Founder
A Pulitzer-Prize winner and National Geographic Photographer, Jay’s work has appeared in 15 of the high profile A Day in the Life of… series. His work also has won several awards in the World Press International Competition, including the ‘Golden Eye’ award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism, and multiple awards in US competitions.
Jay Dickman has worked in the photojournalism field for over 30 years, covering events as diverse as the war in El Salvador to the Olympics, national political conventions to 6 Super Bowls, the 40th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima to photographing Shirley Maclaine. He’s spent three months living in a stone-age village in Papua New Guinea, spent a week under the Arctic ice in a nuclear attack sub (both these for National Geographic), and sank on a boat on the Amazon. He’s flown around the world for a corporate shoot for EDS Corporation. The range of what Jay’s covered is quite extreme, and he feels incredibly fortunate to work in a business he loves.
Jay’s client list ranges from EDS to Nike, Marlboro to the NFL. Publications include: National Geographic, LIFE, Conde’ Nast Traveler, Time, Fortune, Forbes, Sports Illustrated, GEO, Stern, American Way, etc. Corporate clients include EDS Corporation, Nike, Dell Computers, Dresser Industries, Hewlett Packard, Quaker, CH2M Hill, The Polk Company and Sun MicroSystems.
More than twenty-five assignments for the National Geographic Society, he was also featured in a national TV ad campaign for American Express. He currently is an Olympus Visionary, an HP Pro Photographer and a Lexar Elite Photographer, utilizing the latest technology from those companies.
In addition to working with many other workshops, including the Maine Photographic Workshops, Photography at the Summit and American Photo Mentor Series, Jay and his wife, Becky, are founders of the FirstLight Workshop series. Events have been hosted in the Mid-Pyrenees of France, the Western Highlands of Scotland, Barcelona, Dubois, Wyoming and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Future workshops are being planned in the Aeolian Islands of Italy and Colorado.
McGraw-Hill has published Perfect Digital Photography, of which Jay is a co-author with FirstLight instructor Jay Kinghorn.