About Me
My name is Jason, and I live in southeast Tennessee with my wife and daughter. I like reading books and sweet iced tea and listening to music and watching sci-fi and taking pictures and laughing out loud and walking in the woods and poetry and sleeping in and talking over dinner and arguing about the abstract and going for drives in the country.
I dislike romantic comedies and fundamentalism and pop culture and busy work and spilling things and retail shopping and direct sunlight and fashionableness and pragmatism and clearcutting and the use of the word “like” as an interjection.
How I Got Into This Mess
Christmas of 2004 was a busy time for me. My daughter, Lillian was born two months early on the 22nd of December, so she and my wife were both in the hospital. My daughter was lying under a heater in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit, and my wife was sitting around in the hospital, waiting for her blood pressure to drop below 150 so she could go home. This was the first Christmas in my entire life that I wasn’t thinking about presents.
But the presents came anyway. On the day my daughter was born, I was in my wife’s hospital room, waiting for the doctor to tell us it was time for our baby to be born. My wife’s parents came in the room. The next time we would see them they would be “Grammy” and “Granddaddy” forever. He handed me a small vinyl case and forced a “Merry Christmas. It was a camera. It was my first camera, ever. (It was for the both of us, but I would call it mine.) I took pictures of everything to do with the baby and my wife, Cara, those next few weeks. But something happened to me. I began to see that the pictures I was taking weren’t ordinary. The way the pictures looked seemed different than ordinary snapshots, only, I couldn’t describe how.
After a few weeks, I was no longer taking pictures of only my wife and daughter. Other things would catch my eye. I would be driving and have to pull over because I saw an old barn in a field that I had to get a picture of. While walking to class, I would stop and try to capture the way the sun was shining on a flower. It was like some disease had infected me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It got worse. I signed up for a beginning photography course at my college the following semester. My teacher taught me some new tricks, and I learned all the technical phrasing to go along with my new-found passion. I was seeing things differently. People, trees, buildings, light and shadow… The whole world was my lens.
It’s been quite a few years now since all that happened, but pictures continue to shape my worldview (and vice versa, of course). Photography has become an almost effortless pursuit. Actually taking the pictures is an mostly intuitive process, but it is at the same time a pure and simple spiritual exercise. Well, enough analysis of my own photography (I’m sure I’ll come back to that later). Go look at some pictures!
