{"id":101201,"date":"2026-01-21T10:22:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T17:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=101201"},"modified":"2026-02-25T17:19:48","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T00:19:48","slug":"through-his-own-lens-steve-coray-and-the-making-of-a-life-in-pictures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/through-his-own-lens-steve-coray-and-the-making-of-a-life-in-pictures\/","title":{"rendered":"Through His Own Lens: Steve Coray and the Making of a Life in Pictures"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Black-and-white<\/a>

For a photographer used to staying behind the lens, the book becomes a rare self-portrait\u2014made from decades of looking outward.<\/p><\/div>\n

Photographers spend their lives recording other people\u2019s stories\u2014weddings, events, news, the fleeting moments that make up someone else\u2019s memory. But they rarely turn the focus on themselves.\u2028\u2028For longtime Utah photographer Steve Coray, that inversion became both a creative challenge and a reckoning. His recently self-published photo book grew out of a desire to preserve meaning in the vast archive he\u2019s built over decades behind the lens. \u201cI have tens of thousands of images,\u201d he says. \u201cI really kept almost everything over the years\u2014old bags, prints, negatives. They mean a lot to me. But when I die, they suddenly become garbage.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Without children or grandchildren to inherit his work, Coray decided to make something that could outlive him, a single object that distills his relationship with photography into a tangible legacy. \u201cI should create some kind of a legacy,\u201d he recalls thinking. \u201cSomething that reflected me\u2014especially my love of photography. And so it just grew into this thought that I should create a coffee table book.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Coray\u2019s life in photography wasn\u2019t planned. He started shooting as a teenager, taking a few classes in high school and carrying a camera through college \u201cbut never taking any photo classes\u2014which I regret,\u201d he says. The turning point came in the 1980s, when he enrolled in a correspondence course through the New York Institute of Photography. \u201cThey\u2019d mail you assignments, you\u2019d mail back prints, and they\u2019d send critiques on cassette tape,\u201d he says, laughing. \u201cIt was slow but personal, and it made me realize this was something I could actually do.\u201d<\/h4>\n

That training led to his first job in photojournalism\u2014a staff position at a small newspaper in St. George, Utah. He remembers the unconventional audition: \u201cThe photo editor said, \u2018Go buy a roll of Tri-X film, shoot it in a photojournalistic mode, and send me the unprocessed film.\u2019 I said, \u2018Okay,\u2019 hung up, and then thought, What\u2019s a photojournalistic mode?\u201d He hit the library, shot people in Salt Lake City\u2019s Liberty Park, mailed off the roll, and got the job.<\/h4>\n

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