Jim Herrington

Willie Nelson by Jim Herrington

2004

At 13 years old, Jim Herrington photographed Benny Goodman with his new 35mm camera. More recently, he shot the latest album cover for The Black Keys. In the 40-plus years between, Herrington has traveled throughout the US and Europe documenting music culture that is either straight from the source or deeply influenced by the roots of American music — rock & roll, blues, country, folk, jazz and their many crossbred amalgamations. His portraits of musicians – as well as actors, authors, and other public figures – including the likes of The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Morgan Freeman, Dolly Parton, Cormac McCarthy, Sir Ian McKellen, Jerry Lee Lewis and Willie Nelson – have appeared in the pages of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and others since the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, unbeknownst to the music and magazine world, Herrington quietly began a side project. While circling the globe over the next twenty years, he created a portrait series of early-to-mid 20th century mountain climbing legends. These determined men and women were at the cutting edge of an activity mostly unknown to the public at the time, using primitive gear along with their considerable wits, talent, and fortitude to climb unscaled peaks around the world. Herrington’s effort resulted in his first book, The Climbers, a collection of sixty black-and-white portraits that document these rugged individualists today. Using images and words, Herrington captures their humanity, obsession, intellect and frailty to craft an intimate study of what it means to truly live on the edge — and what it means to grow old. The Climbers received both the Grand Prize and the Mountaineering History awards at the 2017 Banff Film & Book Festival, with a subsequent years-long book tour across Europe, North America and Asia. His photography has been exhibited internationally and is in numerous private collections