Joel D. Kitchens was born in Birmingham, AL, the son of a Methodist minister. He lived in several small towns in the northern part of that state. From an early age, he held two strong fascinations that would greatly impact his life: history and photography. In college, Joel majored in history with plans to continue into graduate school, and eventually teach history at the college and university level. In his senior year of college, he needed an art credit and took a basic photography course which taught the fundamentals of working in a traditional darkroom (no digital in those days!). From that point he was hooked on the magic of watching an image form in the developing tray under the darkroom light. As is the case with many others, life took Joel on a circuitous journey. He earned multiple graduate degrees (including history), and eventually arrived at Texas A&M University as a librarian and liaison to the History Department in 1997. When Joel and his new wife bought their home in College Station, his father-in-law helped build his first photography darkroom. Joel used this opportunity to move beyond basic 35mm photography to large format photography with view cameras and 4” by 5” negatives. His interests in history and photography merged as he began taking photographs of San Antonio’s Spanish missions. Not being Roman Catholic or a native Texan, Joel read extensively on the missions hoping to make better informed images. In his research, he found a story that was not being told which became the basis for his doctoral program at Texas A&M University. He earned the Ph.D. in history in 2016. Five years later, Joel retired and has been using nearly every minute to work on both fine art photography and revising his dissertation into the book, San Antonio and its Missions: Three Centuries of History, Memory, and Heritage, published earlier this year by the Texas A&M University Press.