Jessie and James met while working in a café in New Orleans. We got married and moved to Brooklyn in 2000, where we began our careers in the publishing industry.

In 1947, E.B. White wrote, “No one should come to New York to live unless they are willing to be lucky.” We set about shooting as a team in May of 2004.

We love shooting on location, and to photograph the charms of every day life. 

We photograph stories for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Domino, Sherman's Travel, Travel+Leisure, Budget Travel, Everyday with Rachel Ray, Food Arts and custom publications. We photographed a lifestyle book for Harper Collins called Practically Posh, released in July 2008. This spring we were included in the PDN 30.

When she’s not busy shooting, Jessie works on her dissertation on the impact of early photography in the political movements of the 1850s at NYU, where she is an honorary fellow at the Humanities Initiative. James wrote an MA thesis that analyzed reader’s responses to cinematic narrative.

In her research, Jessie discovered that the verb “to daguerreotype” once meant “to represent or describe with minute exactitude.” In this spirit we photograph pedestrians, elaborate desserts, beach towels, hiking trails, surfers, apartments, farms, open highways, artists, libraries, bicycles, business owners, bedrooms, and plazas. We love to represent people: the places they live, the things they do, what they wear, and where they like to go.

We have two personal projects underway: a portrait of art networks that explores the connections between art practice and personal admiration, and a book on how readers visualize famous literary images. You can follow these projects as they develop and read our letters home at www.morganandowens.blogspot.com.

Send us an email at photo@morganowens.com. To schedule an assignment or view our portfolios, please call James at (917) 412-0813.