Jim Alinder

J. Alinder was born in Californian, but grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He developed an early interest in photography and became a freelance professional photographer while a teenager. Alinder received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Macalester College and completed two years of graduate work at the University of Minnesota, before becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Somali Republic. He was photography advisor to the Ministry of Information in Mogadishu, Somalia from 1964 to 1966. Alinder spent the next decade (1970s) as a professor of art at the University of Nebraska. He has taught beginning through graduate level creative photography classes. Alinder is also a popular lecturer and workshop instructor. In 1977, at the invitation of Ansel Adams, he became the executive director of The Friends of Photography in Carmel, developed it into the nation's largest nonprofit photography organization. Alinder has written or edited some forty books on photography and he as been the curator or director of more than 150 exhibitions. After a dozen years, Alinder resigned from that directorship to return to being a full-time artist, and moved with his wife, Mary, to The Sea Ranch on the Northern California Coast in 1990. In that year they opened the Alinder Gallery in nearby town of Gualala. While specializing in original images by Ansel Adams, the gallery maintained an excellent selection of work by many other great photographers and also brought the work of deserving new artists to the public’s attention.