Photography Credits

We are grateful to the photographers who have helped developed the beautiful photographs on our website. Many of our photos were taken by Headwaters staff, including Elizabeth Sutton, Jonathan Walker-VanKuren, Kate Asquith, Ivy Makia, and Mark Lilly.

We also appreciate the contributions of local professional photographer, John Farrell, for his photographs of Camp Waldo and the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective. You can find his other work at johnwfarrell.com.

More about John

John William Farrell is a West Virginia born photographer, the product of seven generations farming the Big Bend of the Greenbrier River, in Summers County. Although he moved with his parents to New Jersey when young, he never lost connection with his West Virginia roots. He began photographing while in his teens, in order to share the wonders of his farm life in West Virginia with his suburban schoolmates. 

John attended Montclair High School while working for a local camera store.  After graduation he attended Rochester Institute of Technology, transferring to New York’s School of Visual Arts to study photography with Gary Winogrand. In New York City, John became a professional photographer of modern corporate architecture, and up-and-coming celebrities including Sandra Bullock, Melanie Griffith, Bob Marley and TBone Burnett.  He provided visuals for magazine editorials and advertising, contributing to Vogue, The New Yorker, New York Times, High Times, Metropolitan Home, Details Magazine, and the West Virginia Quarterly, among others. An exhibit featuring the Pence Springs Resort, a West Virginiacollaboration with the German artist, Stefan Roloff, was held at Thread Waxing Space, New York City, in 1995, and published by MIT’s architectural journal, Assemblage.  His photograph, Windows at Dawn, another collaboration with Roloff, was included in the exhibit ”The Photography of Invention, Pictures of the 1980’s” at the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in 1989, and resides in the permanent collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

After twenty successful years in New York City, John returned to his family home to restore the land of his ancestors.  Since then, his photographic work has focused on West Virginia subjects, documenting the construction of Tamarack, the Darby Collection of Native American Artifacts at Davis & Elkins College, his life on the farm, and West Virginia current events.  He collaborated with author, Phillip Bagdon, providing photography for Essential Cass, a book about the Cass Scenic Railway, designed to facilitate a new West Virginia tourist economy. A landscape architect on a grand scale, his farm’s lush organic panorama is his camera’s favorite subject. His passions for nature and photography blend together in an intimate way, inspiring photographs that represent a communion with the earth of West Virginia. His landscape photography speaks of his deep bond with the land and its stories; a vision he is compelled to photograph in order to share.