Justus Thomas

Justus Wayne Thomas

Justus Wayne Thomas is a Nashville native who grew up in Goodlettsville and graduated from Madison High School. He majored in Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, got his law degree at the University of Tennessee College of Law, and has been a practicing attorney since 1986.

His experience as a photographer began in earnest as an exchange student at the University of Regensburg in Germany, participating in Vanderbilt’s “Junior Year Abroad” program in 1978-79. Thomas brought his parents’ Minolta SR-T 201 camera with him and, upon arrival in Regensburg, found a fully equipped, closet-sized darkroom in his dormitory’s basement.

Thomas’ informal photographic education continued back in Nashville as a lab technician at Image Custom Lab, a black-and-white film and print lab owned and run by Jimmy Ellis, a legendary local photojournalist, then recently retired from The Nashville Tennessean.

Thomas’ photographs have hung in galleries around the country, including The Sarratt Gallery at Vanderbilt, The Parthenon Galley in Nashville, The SE Center for Photography, PhotoPlace Gallery, A Smith Gallery, Si Gallery (Dab Art Co.), Yeiser Art Center, Center for Contemporary Art (Abilene, Texas), University of Texas, San Antonio (Fotoseptiembre Festival), Clara M. Eagle Gallery (Murray State University), and at the SlowExposures annual exhibition of photography focused on the rural South, in Zebulon, Georgia.

https://www.ambientshadow.net/

In the Fall of 2024, Daylight Books published Thomas’ first book, “The River Will Be a Part of Us,” a documentary photobook featuring images he captured during a 1,420-mile journey he shared with some college friends down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers on an oar-driven, homemade raft in 1981.

Here’s a recent Q&A about the book in Chapter 16 – https://chapter16.org/straight-on-til-morning/

Nashville Scene Article

Johanna Vann
Pat Blankenship