ere it not for a chance listing in a newspaper thrown his way nearly two decades ago, Alaska-grown photographer Brian Adams might never have turned his raw talent into the decorated career he’s carved out for himself today. And Alaska would be deprived of one of its most important artists.

“A few months out of high school, my brother was going to work and was frustrated with me, and was all, ‘You need to get a job.’” Adams recalls. “And I was like, ‘Yeah… I know.’

“So, my brother took the classified papers and tossed them at me, and I thought, ‘You’ll never find a job in there!’”

While some are just beginning to recognize the benefits of sharing their culture through media outlets, Adams has been doing it for nearly fifteen years—and in style, with high-profile features in publications that include National Geographic, Newsweek, and The New York Times.

Alaska Business: What piece of work are you most proud of?

Brian Adams: I think for me, personally, the I Am Inuit project was huge. That was a really big step for me as a photographer, as a professional, as an artist. But it all kind of goes together. It’s all… connected somehow. You got that first step, that second step, that next step. It all kind of bulks together in a cohesive way. But, getting a photo into National Geographic was a total highlight for me. A huge milestone for me. But to me, I also want my work to be out there for people to see, to see what the times were like in a hundred years from now. I’m really proud of the two books I have out—I Am Inuit and I Am Alaskan. This is what I want to do. What I want to be. I want to keep doing what I like to do as a photographer, what I appreciate as a photographer, and I want to keep doing this work.

I Am Inuit is Adams’ latest achievement in sharing Alaska Native culture. After traveling to, conducting interviews with, and documenting the lives of twenty Inuit villages across the Arctic—Adams says this most recent accomplishment is his most important. Though, the process of realizing this vision required a collaborative effort from a few key organizations.

In 2013, the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) reached out to Adams (the group was impressed with his book I Am Alaskan) about commissioning him for a piece that was partially inspired by the “Humans of New York” project. Fascinated by the proposal, Adams put together a budget detailing how much such an endeavor might cost. Between flights, hotels, rental cars, designing a museum exhibit, printing a book, and his personal fee—it quickly added up.

“I sent them a quote and it was a little over $100,000. And I didn’t hear from them for three months… and I was like, ‘Well I guess that’s not happening,’” he laughs.

But eventually the ICC informed Adams that Arctic Slope Regional Corporation would be awarding the project its first grant funding in the amount of roughly $30,000. “So, we were able to start the project from there,” Adams says, “and then we partnered with the Anchorage Museum who stepped in for the exhibit, the book, and the travel… it’s all connected somehow.”

I Am Alaskan followed a similar path to publication.

“Greg Kimura, who was at the Alaska Humanities Forum, reached out to me—he’s enjoyed my work for a while,” Adams says. “He saw that I was always just making portraits of people, everybody I could; walking down the street asking somebody to take their portrait. So, I had this huge collection of portraits of Alaskans all over Alaska, a hugely diverse body of images—but I didn’t even know it was a body of work until Greg was like, ‘Hey, you got a book there.’” Adams explains that after the initial funding from the Humanities Forum ran out, the Rasmuson Foundation stepped in to cover the additional printing expenses.

Alaska Business: What influences have helped shape your art?

Adams: Growing up in Girdwood was really awesome because the community was really tight, very friendly, we all knew each other. And you know, ‘There goes Brian and David—the little skate kids goin’ to the skatepark.’

And growing up in the skatepark was especially fun because you get over fears really fast, you get used to being around older kids really fast; nobody cares how old you are, you’re just all skating. It was a great community to grow up in.

Though, it is very disconnected to Alaska as far as Alaska Native villages. Growing up there, I did feel very disconnected from my family’s culture. When I was in Kivalina for my grandma’s funeral in ’05, that’s when I realized I wanted to spend my career working in villages. And I wanted my personal work and my main bodies of work to be all focused on working within Alaska Native villages. And I feel like since then, it has been amazing because I’ve been able to use my career to reconnect—or get to know—my own culture. It’s been really rewarding in that sense for me.

On the topic of his education as a photographer—one that shoots almost exclusively in film, barring the occasional quick-turnaround assignment which requires him to rent a digital camera—Adams points to a few serendipitous moments during his formative years. An alum of “the old” Dimond, Adams spent the entirety of his last semester of high school at the King Career Center (KCC), with mornings in the film and video production department and afternoons in the darkroom. “I had this one counselor that was new and didn’t know at the time that I wasn’t supposed to do an entire day at KCC,” he laughs. “It was a really cool intensive for me—a full day of visuals for my last semester of high school.”

Following graduation, it was an ad in the classifieds that led to an opportunity with Clark James Mishler Photography as a part-time photographer’s assistant.

“He was my first mentor when I was like eighteen, right out of high school, and he took me on right away,” says Adams. “We worked together for two years… and then I went and freelanced in 2005.”