Jeffrey Henson Scales is a photographer, editor and educator who began making photographs at age 11 after his parents, his mother a painter and his father an amateur photographer gave him 30 years of Life magazines and a Leica camera. He has since spent more than five decades as a documentary and commercial photographer. His documentary photographs have been exhibited at museums throughout the United States and Europe and have appeared in numerous photography magazines, books, and anthologies.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The City Museum of New York, The George Eastman House, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Weisman Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Museum of Art at Newfields and The Baltimore Museum of Art. 

Mr. Henson Scales is also an award-winning New York Times editor who curates the photography column, “Exposures,” and has been co-editor of the annual Year in Pictures special section for over a dozen years. He is also an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of The Arts, Photography & Imaging department teaching photojournalism there since 2006.

He is the author of two books of photographs, of which his most recent book, In A Time of Panthers, The Early Photographs, a newly discovered archive of photographs Mr. Henson Scales made as a teenager in Oakland of the emergence of the Black Panther Party in the 60s. Including his origin story and rare and intimate portraits of the movement’s leaders in action and in repose, featuring epic images of history’s most influential African American activists.

He is also author of the 2017 book House, which documents life in a legendary Harlem barbershop over the course of six years.

His current project is The Archive Project in which he is digitizing and cataloging over fifty years of his personal and professional photographs, which includes images and narratives from his current books and life as a professional photographer as well as his years in the music industry in which he worked not just as a photographer of album covers but also in the 1970’s as a tour manager and technical professional for major touring artists such as Minnie Riperton, Frank Zappa and Cher.

He has been a resident of New York’s Harlem community since 1986 where lives with his wife, artist, Meg Henson Scales.