A BIT OF BACKGROUND ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I, Jim (or James) McKinnis, am a native Texan, born in San Antonio, “grew up” in Corpus, and graduated from the University of Texas in Austin when it was still a “state” school and

affordable. Having no marketable skills or clue about earning a living, I joined the Peace Corps and spent 719 days in Bolivia. Upon my return, I was hired as an English as a Second Language Instructor at the Defense Language Institute, at Lackland AFB, Texas, and spent the next eight years in ESL, serving as well in Morocco, Vietnam, and Korea.

Somewhere along the way, I had developed writing and photography fantasies which were fulfilled when I was given the chance to explore a second career, for which I was otherwise totally unprepared. I enhanced that lack by bullheadedly choosing to photograph subjects which I liked. However, over a few years, I became skilled as a photographic artist specializing in coloring images by hand. I gained my first national recognition in 1985 and received a commission to write a book on hand coloring techniques seven years or so later.

In another example of being led by chance, I interviewed a photo artist in New Orleans for my book and was told she had just been commissioned by the Louisiana Bar to photograph their “parish” courthouses. Had the interview been a Looney Tunes cartoon, that moment would have shown a lightbulb suddenly being switched on in my head.

It took a while but I amassed twelve hand-colored courthouse photographs which I shared with the then-Texas Bar Journal editor, Kelly Jones, who offered me a photo essay for the following February (1994).

Fast forwarding three decades, I have likely logged thirty thousand miles around Texas photographing more than 180 of the state’s 254 county courthouses, and have had an additional four photo essays appear in the TJB. I became a courthouse fan of the first order.

PS: I have continued to stubbornly choose to photograph subjects I love. My portfolio therefore is hard to pigeon-hole, but then, I doubt I would have done things differently.