Meet Wesley Cummings of Figure & Ground ATL in Poncey-Highlands

Today we’d like to introduce you to Wesley Cummings.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Wesley. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My interest in photography began when I was about 17 years old. I had recently stopped playing baseball after 12 years and needed something else to focus on, so my parents gave me a camera and a roll of film for Christmas that year. Photography quickly satisfied my creative and curious personality immensely. I began to carry my camera everywhere and photograph almost everything just to see what something would look like on film. It wasn’t long before I fell in love with the idea of photography as something, I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

After graduating high school, I decided to forego college and teach myself by studying the works of photographers that I admired. I’d sit around and stare at photographs for a few hours and then go out and try to mimic them. Eventually, I started to notice my own creative vision beginning to form. By this point, I was beginning to feel more confident in my ability, but I still didn’t know how I was going to support myself with my camera. At first, it was photojournalism, and then fine art, but shortly after I discovered the works of August Sander, Richard Renaldi and Alec Soth. From that point on I knew without a doubt that, I wanted to be a portrait photographer.

From there, I gave up any semblance of a social life and spent all of my free time driving around Atlanta and rural Georgia looking for strangers I found interesting and asking them to sit for portraits. A few months later, I was sitting outside of my apartment with my dogs when one of the neighbors approached me and introduced himself. He asked what I did and so, I showed him some of the portraits I had been working on. He found them interesting enough to want to work with me in some capacity, so he told me about an idea for a project he had wanted to work on with a photographer. I was ecstatic that all of the time and effort I had put into my photography felt like it was finally about to pay off. A few months later, we began work on what is now Figure & Ground ATL, a photography project dedicated to promoting Atlanta creatives.

Has it been a smooth road?
It definitely hasn’t been smooth. I was overwhelmed by wanderlust in my twenties, which resulted in not allowing myself to settle down in any one particular place and work on becoming established. I foolishly thought that I could only become the photographer I wanted to be if I was traveling and I definitely feel like that set me back in certain aspects. Eventually, I realized it wasn’t working for me and so I told myself it had to stop. I ended up moving back to Atlanta in 2013 and with the help of some amazing people, I’ve been working hard to make a name for myself ever since.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Figure & Ground ATL story. Tell us more about the business.
Figure & Ground ATL is a collaborative project between myself and John Carroll. We started the brand to help promote Atlanta creatives and the amazing things they do.

What we do is combine high-quality photographs and bite-sized interview questions and present them to our audience over several different social media platforms to introduce them to talented people in Atlanta.

Figure & Ground isn’t and never will be a pay-to-play platform. All creatives featured by us are done so free of charge and are chosen by us, or in some cases recommended by others. In exchange for allowing us to feature them, each creative is given one hundred percent ownership of the images we take of them to do with as they please.

Pricing:

• 30 Minute Studio Session – 3 Images – $50
• 1 Hour Session – 1 Outfit/Environment – 5 Images – $100
• 3 Hour Session – 3 Outfits/Environments – 15 Images – $250

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wesleycummings.com
• Email: wesleyscummings@gmail.com
• Instagram: @wesley_cummings
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/figureandgroundatl
• Other: www.figureandgroundatl.com

Image Credit:
Wesley Cummings

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