Through the Lipscomb lens

Alumna’s career has visually documented Nashville families and Lipscomb’s growth through the decades.

Janel Shoun Smith | 615-966-7078  |  01/21/2025

You may not know it, but Lipscomb alumna Kristi Neal Jones (LA ’84, BA ’88) probably has more to do with how you see Lipscomb University than almost anyone else. That’s because she’s Lipscomb’s senior manager of university photography services, who fills the pages of Lipscomb Now magazine with the images that keep you turning the pages.

Not to mention the many images needed for Lipscomb’s website, marketing materials, event programs and even billboards and airport ads.

But even before her arrival at Lipscomb in 2007, Kristi was making an impact on the community of Nashville through her work with one of the city’s most well-known portrait photographers at Tim Jones Portraiture. Many a family since the1980s has either posed for her or been the subject of her work as a retouch artist. 

In addition, generations of Lipscomb Academy yearbook and senior photos were taken by Tim’s studio, where Kristi got her first job and learned the photography industry over 20 years.

Throughout her career, not only has she worked in portrait photography, art photography and marketing and communications, but she has done it all while the field around her completely revolutionized itself with digital technology and, today, by artificial intelligence.

Kristi says she has always been fascinated with working with small things. As a child she always enjoyed miniature figurines, detailed illustrations and creating tiny art pieces. That preference served her well in the photography studio as she learned how to retouch film negatives at double magnification before sending them to be printed. 

As an art major at Lipscomb, Kristi was headed toward a career as a graphic artist until she took a part-time job as a customer service rep at Tim’s business. Upon graduation, her Saturdays-only job became a full-time gig, and he helped provide training so she could become his in-house retouch artist. 

Much the same way photographers use the software platform AdobePhotoshop to de-emphasize skin blemishes or to smooth out wrinkled clothing today, Kristi would use dyes to make the same changes on the actual negatives in the dark room. Her artist’s training at Lipscomb, helped her quickly learn how to blend the dyes to match skin tones, she said.

Many times, Tim would ask Kristi for help with kids who were unhappy or unsure of having their photos taken which allowed her to learn more on the photography side of the business. Over time she herself began taking children's portraits through a kid’s club program at the studio. She would often accompany Tim as his assistant at weddings and family portraits taken outside the studio.
 

Along the way, she began to pursue selling her own art photography after a chance encounter at a photography conference in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee. During a break in the conference, she noticed a guy outside in the sun drawing on a photo on the trunk of his car. He was using a process called Polaroid© manipulation on an instant photo, where the photographer manipulates the dyes in the photo with a small tool before it fully develops to create an effect akin to an Impressionist painting. The photo must be kept warm to delay the development while manipulating the dyes.

Kristi, with her love of working with tiny images, was instantly hooked. She researched the process and began creating her own art photography using the process. Until the film she used for Polaroid© instant cameras was discontinued she often sold her works at art shows throughout the east, including Lipscomb Academy’s Art Event and at a booth in a local antique and art mall.

Over the years, her job at Tim Jones Portraiture gave her the chance to learn photography from throughout the century, from a bellows camera, a type of camera invented in the 1800s, to today’s high-tech digital cameras. Tim was the first photographer in Nashville to begin taking portraits with a digital camera, said Kristi.

Now in the digital age, she was able to magnify the photos on the computer, fixing stray hairs, coloring and blemishes using a stylus instead of paint brushes and dyes. Once again her Lipscomb training came to play, as digital retouching is more akin to drawing more than painting, she said. Re-touching all the little aspects of headshots and portraits is still one of her favorite aspects of her job.  

In 2007, Kristi decided to accept the opportunity to become Lipscomb’s photographer. With strong family ties to Lipscomb and two school-age children, the decision was a practical one, but one that opened up many possibilities for her to learn new styles of photography and develop many new relationships.

In portrait photography, everything is set in place ahead of time. At Lipscomb, her job includes not just headshots shot in the studio and group shots taken outdoors, but events as they are ongoing and people interacting in real time. 

Over the years, she has provided the official visual record of the many changes and growth at Lipscomb. She has ruined more than one pair of shoes taking construction photography as the campus boomed. She knows the best angle inside and outside every campus building for shooting portraits. There is nobody on campus who attends more campus events than she—from Bisons Weekend and high-profile guest speakers, to Singarama, student concerts or the annual student fashion show. Her lens sees it all.

During her years at Lipscomb, she learned, at another conference, how to use a macro lens, which allows the photographer to take extremely up-close shots, often used for nature photos of plants, bugs and birds. Kristi, the lover of all things tiny, found a new hobby for her personal time and can often be found taking photos of the critters in her backyard. Her family calls her “the bug whisperer.”

So what does the woman who now has photos of herself with Magic Johnson, Garrison Keiller, former President George W. Bush and former Lipscomb president Willard Collins (AD ’36) from various Lipscomb events she has covered say is her favorite part of photographing life at Lipscomb?
 

Documenting the big—and small—moments in students’ lives, such as the behind-the-scenes celebrations in the Allen Arena tunnels where students line up for graduation or families gathered in Bison Square to shoot a photo after an academic pinning ceremony. Whether it’s winning at Dodgeball or the Sunset Social at QuestWeek, Jones’ loves seeing the excitement, passion and happiness in Lipscomb’s students.

“I love being able to be with students during important or happy moments that need to be captured,” she said. “Each student has a story. I love it when they share them with me. It's what brings me back to work each day.”