A local wedding photographer is making amends with the central Ohio community after recovering from substance abuse and depression that left dozens of his clients in the dark.
John Ferreira, 34, remembered seeing a Reddit forum post about him and his business “John R Photo” over two years ago, warning other users not to hire him and that he had taken payment for wedding photos and never followed through with the photos for his clients.
“People started bombarding me with phone calls, fake requests, harassing text messages, all that stuff,” Ferreira said of the Reddit post. “I just completely disconnected and was dead-set on that was just what my life was going to be — no real will to live or do anything besides get high.”
At the time of the Reddit post, Ferreira said, he was deep in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction. He had dozens of clients who he accepted payment from and had even taken their wedding photos.
“I would try and do things that made me feel normal. One of the things that was familiar was shooting weddings, so I would still go, and I would shoot the gig,” he said. “Once I would get back home, that was it. I would just sit there and exist — drunk. I just stopped doing the other half of the stuff for weddings.”
Ferreira, who moved to Columbus in 2017 from Florida, got into photography as a hobby — and because he learned photographers could get into concerts for free. After taking photos of some shows, people began asking if he was a full-time photographer, so he turned it into a business.
Ferreira said he began heavily abusing alcohol after he fell into a deep depression following a sudden divorce, coupled with new stress from the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. From there, he said, he also began abusing crack cocaine.
“Drugs took over, and obviously the depression was tenfold,” he said.
Making amends
Eventually, substance abuse and depression cost Ferreira his apartment on the South Side. He wasn’t there when he was evicted, so by the time he came back, all his belongings had been picked over by others. After being evicted from a second apartment, he began living out of a van and was homeless for about two months.
“I would think about all of this stuff that I had to fix, right. And it became so overwhelming,” he said. “So my only solution was to keep getting high and drunk instead of just slowly trying to do it.”
In 2023, Ferreira agreed to watch his friend’s dog in Grove City while they were away, and his friend agreed to let him use his fiancée’s car, which had tracking software. While Ferreira was using the car. His friend called him and asked him why the car was on the West Side of Columbus and why the vehicle had an extra 1,000 miles on it in just three days.
“Then he showed up at the crack house that I was staying at one day and just took the keys. and was like ‘Go get f—— help,'” Ferreira said.
A few days later, Ferreira checked himself into New Day Recovery in Youngstown and has been sober since. After getting sober, he started using his friend’s laptop to edit and send photos he had taken for clients, finally completing the work people had paid for. In all, he had 36 weddings to complete, as well as birthday parties, engagements and other events that he shot.
Several of his former clients had opened a case with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office General’s Office, and he would often get calls from the office. One day while he was at New Day, he finally decided to answer. He gave the office a list of all the clients he had outstanding work for and chipped away at the work throughout 2023 until he had none left.
As he finished his commitments to the people expecting their photography, he said a majority of them seemed to be understanding and glad he has gotten the help he needed.
In late March, Ferreira made his own post to the Columbus Reddit forum, explaining how he had been working to make amends with his clients and that things can get better for people struggling. He even said he found another client through the post whose photos he needed to do.
“Redemption is possible,” he said to The Dispatch.
Now over a year sober, Ferreira works at Ohio Addiction Recovery Center in Grove City as activities director, where he tries to show others struggling that an important tool for staying sober is having fun and enjoying yourself. He even said he looks forward to getting back into shooting weddings, concerts and other events.
One thing he hopes people take away from his experience is that people struggling with mental health issues and substance abuse aren’t alone.
“My story’s similar to so many other people’s stories,” he said. “Just because the damage that I caused was more widespread and felt in different ways doesn’t make it different. Everybody has the bridges they burned, or the ones that are burning, the ones that are gone. The amends that need to be made if possible.”
