Justin Kimball (born 1961) is an American photographer, educator, and artist. He currently teaches at Amherst College as the Conway Professor in New Media.
Museums which have collected Kimball's work include: The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, and the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio.
Kimball was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1961. He earned a BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 while studying under professors Wendy Snyder MacNeil, Gary Metz, and William "Billy" Parker. After earning his BFA he worked as an assistant to photographer Duane Michals and then earned his MFA in photography from the Yale University School of Art in 1990 where he studied under photographers Richard Benson and Tod Papageorge.
After finishing his MFA, he taught as an assistant professor of Photography at The Rhode Island School of Design and then as an assistant professor of Photography at Orange Coast College. Kimball began teaching at Amherst College in 2001 and is currently the Conway Professor in New Media.
In 2003 Kimball was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship which funded his first monograph, Where We Find Ourselves, published in 2006. The photographs, taken from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, depict how Americans find leisure in the natural landscape. Photographs from the book were included in a collection of photographs presenting the changing ideas surrounding family in the U.S. titled Spirit of Family and was published by former Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper Gore.
Elegy, Kimball's third monograph, "catalogs the victims of de-industrialization between 2012 and 2016" writes William Meyers, from The Wall Street Journal. Meyers describes Kimball's work as one that avoids the pristine colonial homes of New England and delves into a world of decay. Cate McQuaid, reviewing for The Boston Globe, writes that the "forceful photos of buildings and streets dominate" while the people although seemingly of less focus than the buildings around them, portray "lucid stories of struggle and the bonds of family and friends". Reviewing for Fraction Magazine, Lauren Greenwald concludes that "Kimball offers us a portrait of our times for reflection, sensitively and beautifully" and notes the apparent disconnection of the subjects from one another despite them being in the same photo. Their disconnection seems to make Greenwald consider if the images are composites and writes that "the disjunction between the elements in the image [is] too profound".