Photographer Focus #2: Jackie Spinner

She opens her TEDx talk talking about a blue vest. It’s a flak jacket. Twelve pounds of Kevlar, in the specific shade of blue the UN adopted in 1947 for its flag. The colour that says: neutral press, not a combatant. When it’s 120 degrees in the shade and you’re running from mortar fire, she says, those twelve pounds carry all of your history and hopes and dreams. She kept it after leaving Iraq. It sits in her office at Columbia College Chicago now. She lets her students try it on every January during her war stories class. Jackie Spinner with a blue flak jacket How heavy, she tells them every year. Can you imagine running with it? But the woman who wore that vest didn’t start out in a war zone. Jackie Spinner grew up in Decatur, Illinois, a pipe fitter’s daughter. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Blue-collar, central Illinois, the kind of town where you don’t grow up expecting to go to Baghdad. Her parents met on a school bus at sixteen. She got her start in journalism through a…