About Billy
Based in Los Angeles, Billy Sheahan has an eye for curious image making and storytelling, combined in his still and motion photography. He is exhibited throughout the United States and collected internationally.
Billy has been looking through viewfinders since the age of three, when after attending a live children’s television show in his native Chicago, he came home and constructed his first “camera” out of a cardboard box, cutting a small square on one side and a larger square on the opposite side. He used a piece of wood stuck through the bottom as the “tripod.” Many real cameras followed in the next five decades.
Despite formal training in film & television while attending college, Billy’s greatest teachers were the large photography coffee table books he would study for countless hours in local bookstores before he could afford to actually buy them. Somehow, he was never ejected for loitering. Books of the great photographers, George Hurrell, Helmut Newton, Edward Weston, Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herb Ritts, allowed Billy to deconstruct their craft of composition, lighting, approach to their subject matter, and their vision.
Combined with an award winning career as a film editor for more than three decades, Billy’s clients suggested he would be an excellent director as well. And after a time he gave up the slash-ladened title of director/photographer/editor for the more simplified moniker of, Curious Visualist.
Billy’s curiosity over the years ushered him to international travel, making street photography with a timeless quality wherever he found himself. Perhaps more significantly, from that same curiosity, but from a more human expression, emerged his powerful fine art nude photography, both of these genres drawing on inspiration from his list of bookstore mentors.
Billy is a member of the Digital Cinema Society, the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and the Association of Independent Creative Editors (AICE).
Billy Sheahan photographed in Chicago by Mark Hauser