As a young boy in Kansas, Jack Fields dreamed of "far-away places with
strange sounding names". After a formal education and a wartime stint in the
South Pacific, Fields embarked upon a 50 year career, traveling exotic lands on
assignment for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Look, Life, and Saturday
Evening Post.
Before World War II, Fields earned a BS in science from Kansas State
College and was planning to teach but was sent to New Guinea with the armed
forces where he began taking pictures. He was assigned as a photographer for the
Air Force’s Yank Magazine when he contracted tuberculosis and was
returned to the U.S. to recuperate. While in a veterans hospital in Colorado
Springs, Fields met Dorothy, also a patient and fellow TB sufferer, whom he
married in 1948.
After five years of recuperation, the Fields moved to Los Angeles
where Jack attended the Art Center College of Design while his wife enrolled in
a writing school. As an art student, he sold his first photos to Look.
Completing studies, the Fields traveled to Europe contracting with various
publishers and then returned to photograph in the USA and South Pacific. Because
the South Pacific continued to lure Fields, he now has one of the world’s
largest collections of color photographs of that area. His work has filled
twelve photobooks, including "South Pacific", beautifully produced with text by
his wife, Dorothy.
Fields was the first photojournalist to report on Micronesia after
it became a U.S. Trust at the end of WWII. He shot the laser beam at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center which is being released as a commemorative
stamp in August, 1999. In the late 1970s, Fields served for three years as
Visiting Professor at San Jose State University where he pioneered a "no-nonsense" approach to
photography, a subject that has often been presented as "pure art" at many
universities.
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