Julian Clay Shelton is a photographic artist and disabled veteran whose practice emerged from a life marked by war, silence, and spiritual reckoning. Raised on National Geographic and early documentary photography, his earliest understandings of the world were shaped by images, both as tools of witness and as instruments of power.

Before turning to art, Shelton served as a military intelligence officer specializing in narcoterrorism, counterinsurgency, insurgency strategy, and unmanned aerial systems. That experience—of surveilling, scripting, and weaponizing—now informs the central inquiry of his work: What does it mean to rehumanize, to witness, to rebuild after having once destroyed?

He returned to photography not through career ambition, but as a form of moral recovery. His images often engage with themes of structural violence, abandoned myths, masculinity, and insurgency. Drawing from documentary tradition, personal history, and Radical Feminist theory, Shelton is developing a practice that blurs the line between testimony and cosmology.

He currently lives and works in California and is an MFA candidate in Photography and Media at California Institute of The Arts.