Hi, my name is Jackie Alpers and I am a food photographer and author of the Taste of Tucson cookbook. My parents had several coffee table books in the mid-1980s, including “A Day in the Life of America” which first piqued my interest in photography and inspired me to sign up for the black and white photography classes offered at my high school. I loved developing film and making photographs in the school's darkroom.

After high school I got a degree from the Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio.

Yes! My mother bought me a Mickey Mouse 110 camera at the grocery store that came loaded with black and white film. I was 7 or 8. My first shot was of my little brother crouching in the driveway sucking his thumb, our family station wagon was parked in the garage behind him.

I use a Canon 5Ds and prime lenses, including the 100 and 50 macros.

Success!

I'm truly touched by every compliment. I'm inspired every time someone expresses admiration for my work.

That's a hard question to answer, I think it's a cumulation of my life experiences mixed with my particular sense of humor and improvisational skills.

Dynamic, relatable, fun.

Thank you! It's a huge honor and I'm thrilled! It means the world to me and I'm just thrilled to share this with the team at Visit Tucson.

I have been working on a series of images documenting the Sonoran style cuisine of Southern Arizona that includes food from local chefs and my own regionally inspired recipes. The recipe for the barbacoa taco I photographed was created by James Beard nominated chef Maria Mazon of Boca Tacos in Tucson for an article I wrote about the women chefs. Since it was the height of the pandemic, Maria was nice enough to package all of the elements of the taco separately for me to take home and recreate in my studio.

In my portraits I am looking for honesty and vulnerability. I believe that vulnerability makes us nicer human beings and that this makes the world a little more friendly and more understanding. People who show themselves vulnerable give the other the confidence that they themselves may be who they are.

I am most fascinated when I can see opposite qualities of a person at the same moment. I find this exciting because people are complex. I hope that the portrait touches something of the viewer himself.

In this series, I chose to use only daylight to make the image as natural as possible.

I think that over the years, winning awards has given me more confidence to just be myself.

Irving Penn, Romulo Yanes, Diane Arbus.

Be yourself and never give up.