Jason’s Story

Let’s jump back to 1985 when Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’, Wham!’s ‘Wake me up before you Go-Go’, and Bryan Adams’

‘Summer of ‘69’ filled the airwaves. WrestleMania débuts at Madison Square Garden and the U.S.S.R performs a nuclear test in Eastern Kazakhstan. The Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior is bombed and sunk by French DGSE agents and the wreck of R.M.S. Titanic is discovered.

Microsoft releases the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0, President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time, and I wake one morning knowing that I will make images for the rest of my life. I was 16 years old.

Shortly after my epiphany my Grandmother travelled to Hong Kong with my life savings, $250, and returned with a Cosina CT-7, 50mm lens and a small flash as a birthday gift. The years that followed were consumed with film stock experimentation, reading and trial and error, actually a lot of error.

At night Dad and I would boot my younger brother out of his bedroom and set up a temporary darkroom. We weren’t patient enough to keep the chemicals at their correct temperature so we cooked them to ensure our prints appeared in a matter of seconds. We would print anything we could find negs for and even attempted old glass plates blindly exposing our test strips, great memories!

I loved the 80’s, the clothes, the hair and the music but photographically because it was when I forged my career in the Kodachrome 64 furnace, the National Geographic staple. If you ever shot this stock you’ll recall just how unforgiving it was so as a photographer you either had it or you didn’t, there was no software to cover your lack of ability. KR64 was a brutal Master but it taught you everything you needed to know about correctly exposing in the camera.

In no time I was 18 with a camera in hand and a Rattlesnake trying to latch onto my face. In the years since I’ve been bitten, clawed, scratched and gnawed, crushed, urinated on, shot at, stoned (with rocks!), kicked and slapped by beast and woman alike.

I’ve made my home on branches feet above a pride of 22 lions by a moonlit waterhole in the remote veldt, and spent weeks glued to a piece of timber for 20 hours a day whilst hordes of swarm ticks and mosquitoes tore at my flesh waiting for an endangered wombat to appear. It was another nine months before my wife removed the last of the ticks that had colonized my body.

Friends think my working life akin to Peter Pan’s although I’m not sure which element they are referring to, carefree days full of adventure, annoying wicked pirates, or flying into girls’ bedrooms in the middle of the night. Maybe they’re correct on a variety of fronts but for me photography has always been a lifestyle choice and not a commercial imperative. Although feel free to send donations!

My perceived successes have evolved through a combination of luck, hard work, a masochistic and driven personality, and a healthy lack of respect for self-preservation and sleep. Introspection aside I continue to be blessed in a crucial element in any adults life, I know what I love and I do that as my principal form of employment.

Jason

PS

The images on this website have all come from stories larger than the individual frame. These are all National Geographic images but importantly they are also images I like for one reason or another sometimes for technical characteristics or maybe for the emotional connection I have with that memory. I don’t crop my images preferring to get it right in the camera at the time so panoramic files have been captured on a rangefinder using transparency film and medium format frames were likewise captured on transparency film.