St. Augustine-based artist John Gerstner is no stranger to reinvention. With a career that spans journalism, photo journalism, video production, and multimedia storytelling, Gerstner has lived at the crossroads of communication and creativity.
A former magazine editor and award-winning book author, Gerstner is best known in publishing circles for Genuine Value: The John Deere Journey, a coffee-table art business book named Best Coffee Table Book of 2001. Yet outside the corporate world, he has quietly built a decades-long practice as a visual artist, exhibiting in U.S. galleries and earning a place in private collections around the globe.
His recent work pushes the boundaries of photography by fusing it with painting, sculpture, and digital manipulation.
“From the beginning, I’ve questioned photography’s role as a truth-teller,” says Gerstner. “My goal isn’t harmony, it’s friction. I want to make images that ask more questions than they answer.”
In his series using generative AI and digital editing, Gerstner walks a fine line between what the camera captures and what the imagination constructs. The result creates alluring, mysterious, and sometimes unsettling images.
Gerstner has also self-published two photo books: Life as a Beach (2017), a wry look at Florida beach culture, and Scratching the Surface (2020), a catalog of his early digital work.
“Art is where truth, memory, and invention meet,” he says. “That’s the space I want to live in.”
For John Gerstner, art isn’t about capturing what is. It’s about discovering what might be. You can see more of his work at johngerstner.com.
