Jackie Neale is the founder and lead photographer of Big Day Film Collective—an artist-driven studio dedicated to bold, cinematic image-making for collectors, musicians, and creative teams. Since 2009, Big Day has evolved from an advocacy project for traditional film photography into a hub for high-impact visuals that fuse analog craft with contemporary storytelling.
Jackie Neale specializes in deep, dramatic, film noir–inspired portraiture, alternative processes portraiture, slow-photograph conjoined with cutting-edge digital photographic methods, and hybrid workflows that give campaigns and collections a distinctive, tactile edge. From large-scale editorial concepts to intimate artist portraits, every project is designed to feel like a still from a movie or stepping out of surrealist painting: immersive, layered, and unforgettable.
The studio is committed to supporting, researching, and exhibiting film photography and experimental techniques while delivering production-ready imagery for big-budget music and cultural campaigns. All prints are hand crafted in limited editions for serious collectors and collaborators seeking singular, investment-grade work.
For commissions, campaign visuals, or acquisition inquiries for both Jackie’s work and that of Big Day artists, visitors are invited to get in touch. To view Jackie’s portfolio, please visit https://jackiephoto.com.
Wide Awake In Blue is a museum‑scale, socially urgent project that is conceptually rigorous with formally inventive photographic artworks culminating from three bodies of work; Crossing Over: Immigration Stories, Common Ground Tacony, and We The People Are The Wide Awakes. Exhibited in parts in the past in Venice Biennale collateral events, European Cultural Centre, Louisiana Biennial, 20/20 Photo Festival, Halide Project, The New School New York, Governors Island, with institutional support from Moxie Professional Development, Mural Arts, Mission EDC, the Vilcek Foundation and U.S. Embassy Malta (…and more), this exhibition, January 9–March 1, 2026 in Philadelphia, will run as the first full, immersive U.S. presentation of the entirety of these projects, with sound, textiles, and programming focused on immigration and human rights.
Programs and Event Info to come.
In Wide Awake in Blue, artist Jackie Neale presents a sustained artistic inquiry into how individual lives intersect with the structural conventions that govern migration, belonging, and civic possibility. The monumental cyanotype portraits anchor the exhibition with a visual clarity that resists the rhetoric so often attached to immigration debates. Their Prussian blue tonality, resonant with early photographic experimentation, positions the subjects within a lineage of image-making concerned with truth, transformation, and the politics of representation. By foregrounding lived experience over ideological shorthand, the work draws immigration rights into close conversation with the broader historical arcs of civil rights, women’s rights, and community self-determination. What emerges is a portrait of humanity that supersedes the constraints of policy, inviting the viewer to consider the stakes of recognition in both aesthetic and civic terms.
This approach, rooted in physical encounter rather than photographic likeness, introduces a productive ambiguity. The silhouettes are unmistakably human yet deliberately non-identifying, allowing participants to share personal stories, testimonies, and oral histories without the vulnerabilities that often accompany direct portraiture. The result is an abstracted field of bodies and experiences—at once intimate and anonymous—that sustains the exhibition’s conceptual architecture. The cyanotype’s scale and materiality thus become integral to the work’s purpose, providing both a poetic surface for contemplation and a protective framework for those whose narratives animate the project.
Within the gallery’s constellation of portraits and voices, Wide Awake in Blue underscores the essential role of free expression in any society that aspires to empathy, justice, and civic growth. Freedom of speech is not positioned here as an abstract principle but as a communal tool—one that enables individuals to articulate belonging, contest dehumanizing narratives, and envision new cultural horizons. The project’s living archive and resource hub extend this commitment beyond the walls, offering pathways to immigrant-rights organizations, mutual-aid networks, and community education. The exhibition situates freedom of speech alongside immigration rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and community advocacy, revealing their interdependence within the larger struggle for human dignity. Rather than treating expression as a purely juridical concept, the project frames it as a cultural practice. Together, the artworks and the stories they inspire model how art spaces can function as civic infrastructures: places where rights are named, differences are held with respect, and the imaginative labor of a more humane world becomes a shared responsibility
Central to Wide Awake in Blue is the use of large-scale cyanotypes on fabric, a nineteenth-century photographic process in which light-sensitive chemistry, exposed directly to the sun, yields images in deep, luminous blue. Here, the artist employs the medium not for its antiquarian associations but for its capacity to register presence through contact: bodies, garments, and gestures leave imprints that oscillate between figure and abstraction. The textured weave of the textiles captures these traces with a tactile immediacy that underscores the project’s commitment to lived testimony.
Large Format Fabric Cyanotypes
Bullet the Blue Sky: A Distressed Flag Series Representing Embodied Experiences of Failed Promises in United States
Embodied Experience – HUQ: I Seek No Favor
Apparitions of the Death & Co. 2007–2010
The Cord: Pandemic Photographs
The Cord on view March 1–31, 2020:
My latest exhibition, The Cord, consists of photographic explorations of light and shadow, yin and yang, hope and despair. These photographs are depicting the melancholy of a worldwide pandemic and the uncertainty of the future; the future of relationships, prosperity, and health. Malaise and fear as I am forced to pause into a holding pattern for all ambitions, yet grief and sadness for the loss of life: 2.5 million worldwide and counting.
In these photographs we can see fluctuation and gesticulations of hands and bodies as interventions with light. Each hand appears anchored on the edge of light, but is barely holding on by just its shadow.
The Cord is both a sign of where sadness meets optimism of hope for what is on the other side. The hands will forever keep reaching and reaching and reaching for what no one can presently know. While the shadows represent the ghosts of the hands of time, emphasizing the fleeting poetry of our pandemic time on pause. – Jackie Neale
\”Every disaster acts as an accelerator.\” – Esther Perel
