What began as a hobby, quickly accelerated into a profession as Cash’s talent for capturing the industrial waterfront from dramatic vantage points was heralded in the Wallace Shipbuilder. Later, with studios on the North Shore, Cash pursued freelance work as a commercial photographer in earnest, resulting in loyal clients and assignments for Western Homes and Living. Initially working within the social documentary tradition, Jack Cash drew upon humanist philosophy, formalist values, and respect for photographic craft. His commercial assignments resulted in views of cultivated lands and built environments – the faces of farmers and workers. By the early to mid-1960s, Cash focused on the place of landscape in the Canadian imagination. Using techniques of hand painting black & white images, Cash embraced the dramatic style of colour photography and blurred the boundaries among documentation, photographic art and the tradition of painting.