J. Maurice Bell is a self-taught photographer based out of Texas and Montpellier, France.
He picked up his first SLR (a Pentex K-1000) at the age of eleven and has been behind a camera ever since. Today he combines photography with his love of the mountains and spends up to two months a year in remote locations shooting dramatic landscapes. He also lives in France for up to four months a year where he has developed an expressionism style of photography.
Bell shoots an eclectic mix of images and doesn’t confine himself to one genre. His photographic premise is simple: Find an interesting subject that has great light and shadows and then shoot it.
Even though he is a self-taught photographer, he has taken photography courses and received training at the Houston Center for Photography and School of the World in Costa Rica.
Bell is an alum of NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming and is a certified Wilderness First Responder (a WFRer). The technical skills he acquired at NOLS allows him to travel through the backcountry for up to two weeks at a time and the landscapes he shoots reflect this lineage to the outdoor community. They are dramatic but they can also be brooding and serve as a cautionary tale of how quickly a mountain environment can change.
He is currently in the process of arranging a number of shows in Texas and France and you can generally find him splitting his time.