Jones's photos have received awards from American Photography and an Eisie award from Communication Arts and Life magazine. His image of the Marina City towers in Chicago on the cover of the 2002 WilcoalbumYankee Hotel Foxtrot was included in the book The Greatest Album Covers of All Time.[2]
His achievements as a documentarian include I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco in 2002, which began as a film about the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot but wound up chronicling the major-label pressures and internal drama the band was experiencing at the time.[3] A collection of his candid celebrity portraiture, The Here And Now: The Photographs of Sam Jones, was published in 2007 by HarperCollins. Other published works include Non-Fiction, a collection of cinematic portraits; and Some Where Else, a photographic and musical collaboration with musician Blake Mills in 2015.
In 2014, Jones directed the feature-length Showtime documentary Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued, which reexamines the creative output of Bob Dylan during the Basement Tapes era and documents new recordings of newly discovered Dylan lyrics from 1966-67 by Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens and others at the Capitol Records Studios. The film features Bob Dylan as narrator, and the project, with a resultant album of the songs, has been termed a collaboration between contemporary musical artists and a 26-year-old Dylan.[7][8]
Jones's work for television also includes directing episodes of the Bill Lawrence-created shows Cougar Town, Ted Lasso and Bad Monkey; as well as the HBO series Music Box and Smartless: On the Road, and the documentary Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off.
