Musician, documentarian of blues life and photographer Bill Steber resides in Murfeesboro, Tennessee. He is a critically acclaimed photographer whose work has achieved international fame as a major contributor to the prestigious blues publication Living Blues, where his striking and intimate photos are frequently featured. Bill Steber has documented blues culture in Mississippi for the last 20 years, chronicling the state’s blues musicians, juke joints, churches, river baptisms, hoodoo practitioners, traditional farming methods, folk traditions and other significant traditions that gave birth to or influenced the blues.
Besides his technical proficiency, he manages to bring out the humanity of his photo subjects, in part because he is able to enter the milieu of the musicians, to enter their inner sanctums and capture them in a vulnerable, personal space. Steber exposes his musical subjects with an immediate privacy, an unprecedented closeness, as if you can see into their souls and feel their presence. His masterful tintype photos are revelatory of true blues culture.
Steber, a native of Centerville, Tennessee, was a staff photojournalist for the Tennessean in Nashville from 1989-2004, winning dozens of regional and national awards while shooting everything from national politics to New York runway fashion and the Super Bowl. His latest passion is exploring 21st-century American culture through the use of 19th century wet plate photography, including tintypes, ambrotypes and glass negatives. In addition to his photography, Steber makes music with The Jake Leg Stompers, the Hoodoo Men, The Jericho Road Show and The Worried Minds. His musicality is as impactful as his photography. He sings with a powerful blues voice, and he harmonica, guitar and ukulele, specifically banjo ukulele.
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