Working as a freelance photojournalist covering the wars in Central America and life and death among the Serpent Handling Holiness of Appalachia, his work has appeared nationally and internationally in over thirty newspapers, magazines and hard cover publications that include the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Birmingham News and Post Herald, Oxford American magazine, Esquire magazine and Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sandmountain, L’Eglise aux Serpents, and Redneck Riviera.
photo by Jim Neel from the book, Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington, Copyright 1995
Neel, who documented wars in Central America as a photojournalist in the 1980s, is now working on a group of life-sized child warriors, in terra cotta and iron, called “Enfants de la Terre”—children of the earth. His art wasn’t always political, he says, but that has changed: “Now, I pretty much take a stand.”
Jim Neel 