Our Story

Drop Count Studios is a collaboration between photographers Jon Cox & Andrew S. Bale. The two met in 2003 while pursuing their MFAs at the University of Delaware and have remained constant friends to this day.

Their first collaboration began in 2014 when they traveled to Peru to begin a documentary project on the Ese'Eja, one of the Amazon's last remaining indigenous cultures. 

In 2019, they began to work on ARRIVALS: What's Left Behind, What Lies Ahead. Arrivals is a collaborative multidisciplinary project that began by recording and disseminating the stories of refugees and immigrants living in Idaho and the Native Americans that have been displaced from their ancestral lands. Refugees, immigrants, and Native Americans from over 100 countries are participating in this project.

Andrew S. Bale

Photographer and Content Creator
Lecturer in Art, Dickinson College

Bale received his MFA from the University of Delaware in 2005, and his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1994. He has been a full-time Lecturer of Photography at Dickinson College since 2013, and served as an adjunct professor of Photography prior to that from 2005 until 2012.  He also taught at Messiah College, Lebanon Valley College, and the University of Delaware.

Bale has also worked with children from ages 8-18 in workshops designed to help them explore their visual environment. Bale has exhibited regularly both in group and solo shows since 2004, and has served as the 2008 artist in-residence for the Foundation Espace Ecureuil in Toulouse, France, and the Guest Artist at SCAD’s Lacoste, France campus that same year. 

Most recently, he was a photography team member for the Ese’Eja Cultural Mapping Project, supported by a National Geographic Genographic Legacy Fund Grant and the photo editor for the documentary style book, Ancestral Lands of the Ese’Eja, the true People. A traveling exhibition to accompany this project titled The Ese’Eja People of the Amazon: Connected by a Thread is currently on tour.

Bale’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of Caisse d’Epargne in Toulouse France, the Photomedia Center, Messiah College and Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. 

Jon Cox

National Geographic Explorer
Assistant Professor of Art and Design, University of Delaware

Jon Cox is a National Geographic Explorer, an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Design and Project Liaison in the Interdisciplinary Science Learning Laboratories at the University of Delaware. He also serves as a Board Member of the Dorobo Fund for Tanzania and Board member of the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research.

Cox worked on a six-year collaborative documentary book project with hunter-gatherers in Tanzania titled Hadzabe, By the Light of a Million Fires. Cox has directed over twenty photographic study abroad programs across the globe including destinations to Antarctica, South East Asia, Tanzania, Australia, Tasmania, Argentina and Peru. He was a pioneer in the field of digital photography, served as the adventure photographer/writer for Digital Camera Magazine and authored two Amphoto digital photography books.

Cox is a co-recipient of a National Geographic - Genographic Legacy Fund Grant to support his current collaborative cultural mapping initiative with the Ese’Eja hunter-gatherers living in the Amazonia basin of Peru. A traveling exhibition to accompany this project titled The Ese’Eja People of the Amazon: Connected by a Thread is currently on tour.