Joey retired in March of 2022 after a prolific thirty year career in photography. He worked professionally across the U.S. in editorial content and portraits for personal, commercial and motion picture industry clients. He built an extensive private and corporate client base through artistic vision, execution and experiential distinction. He is now working on personal projects including his ongoing Alumni Project, continuing the stories of former high school senior clients dating back to 1998.
His corporate clients included Yale University, Merrill-Bank of America, Yale New Haven Health, City of New Haven, Easter Seals, Goodwill Industries, State of Connecticut, Kobiona, Carousel Industries, William Raveis, Ovation Benefits Group and dozens of others.
Joey has been a member of PPA since 1995 and served on the Board of Directors of the CT PPA as well as a professional mentor and lead educator with national organizations Senior Portrait Artists and Seniors Ignite. He also has served as an Adjunct Faculty member at Naugatuck Valley College. He was a featured photographer in Gorman Bechard's film "Broken Side Of Time" and has created the promotional images for several other films.
Joey was a founding member of Ignite Masterminds, a group of twenty industry celebrated portrait artists and professional educators. As a lead educator in SPA and SI, he taught and lectured at professional photography conferences across the country for over a decade. With the national SPA and SI Model competitions, he put Connecticut on the national map with seventeen finalists and winners, some going on to professional modeling and careers in media. He employed and mentored over fifty emerging artists entering careers in photography and graphic design and considered his to be a teaching studio.
He graduated from SCSU with a degree in Political Science and worked in government for for several years until realizing "they're all crazy and no one is really paying attention to reality".
As a tradesman from his vo-tech high school, he went back into medical technologies working in the diagnostics fields and then into biochem with reverse osmosis and deionization water purification for pharmaceuticals, medical research and diagnostics. He played a role in the development of the first RNase free water purification system for DNA sequencing and research.
Joey's career in photography began to develop in his childhood. He grew up like many Gen-Xers watching the Vietnam War on TV and asking a lot of questions. His dad always had a subscription to National Geographic magazine which he hoarded in his room, attracted to the photography. He then discovered Life Magazine and bought every issue with his paper route money, and his love for photo essays and storytelling developed. He produced the photos and assisted in the layout of his Junior High school yearbook and then did so again with his High School yearbook. Most of his thousands of clients know him for producing the senior yearbook for Cheshire High School from 2003 to 2018.
His professional, full time career began after volunteering to create a two year photo documentary for the New Haven chapter of Habitat For Humanity's "Women's Builds". Joey produced a slide show from the work for an HFH fundraiser at the Yale Law School, and was approached by a number of corporate donors and philanthropists about doing work for them. He went home, resigned from his tech job, opened his studio, and never looked back.
