Jake Thompson:
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JAKE'S FRIENDS
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JAKE
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Jake, what’s up man? You seem like a cool guy. Tell me a little bit about your story?
Well hey! I’m a photographer, as you could guess, from a suburb of Portland Oregon called Vancouver. I want to say I started shooting when I was probably around 15, during my sophomore year of high school back home. I wasn’t even really into photography at all. I grew up skateboarding with my friends, they were all really good and I was the one that was kind of not that great. I bought a camera so I could take videos of them skateboarding and I remember the day I bought it I sat in my room taking pictures of like staplers and other random sh*`t for like 4 hours because I was so fascinated. It had me hooked instantly.
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What’s the Jake way of living, how would your friends describe you?
Umm I mean, relatively uncharacteristically compared to other people that make art, I’m pretty extroverted. I’m loud and I won’t shut up. I’m my father's son in that way, he’s always been an insanely funny and outgoing person. I feel like it’s more common as a photographer or artist to be introverted and in your own head a lot, which is true for me as well, but I think my way of escaping that is being really social and outgoing. I’m one of those people where I’ll be laser focused on things that I care about and then if I don’t care about something you cannot for the life of me get me to do it. This translates to being a quite motivated artist but outside of that it’s hard to get me to care about a whole lot. Back in high school I got terrible grades because I just did not care about it.
"I wasn’t even really into photography at all. I grew up skateboarding with my friends, they were all really good and I was the one that was kind of not that great."
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Is that why you ended up going to the School of Visual Arts?
Well, I transferred because I’ve been wanting to go there for a long time. Being the really socially active person that I am, I think I would have had a great time going to a big university and being part of a fraternity, and I probably would have had fun but, I would have never been able to live with myself because half way through high school I realized that this is something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Hence the bad grades because by about sophomore year I was giving up on doing assignments and laser focused on building a portfolio.
I can’t remember seeing someone with such extremes range, and variation in their work! What is going on, that’s super sweet!
Yeah, I mean I have this odd spectrum of what I like to take pictures of. I kind of describe the trajectory of becoming a photographer to other people like this: You start out by learning how to take a good picture, you take a few and then you spend a couple years taking as many good pictures as you can to the point where you feel you know what you’re doing. Once you feel you have the eye for it, the vision, that subconscious-whatever, that points your eyes towards those good pictures, then it becomes about finding something to talk about, and a story you want to tell. I think that’s where I am right now. I was taking good photographs for the past 5 years or so but now I’m finally getting projects going that I really care about. This creates a wide range since I’m usually shooting for multiple projects I’m working on.
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You don’t seem to struggle with being freaked-out by pursuing new projects from the high and the satisfaction of the previous project. It looks like you just attack a new type of genre....
I mean I’ll definitely have to credit the school that I go to. It can get freaky when you look at all these great ambitious projects famous photographers have done from 50 years ago where they document something like, our changing world or shifts in society and culture. My professors have helped me come back down to earth by reminding me that you can kind of do a project or even take a picture of anything really. Anything that interests you, like whether it’s fu*king doorknobs, it really doesn’t matter. No matter who you are or what you do, everyone has a story that they could tell. Going back home after being away for months slapped me across the face. I was like oh my god I love this place, and then just making a project out of it was my way of writing a love letter to where I grew up.
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"You can kind of do a project or even take a picture of anything really. Anything that interests you, like whether it’s fu*king doorknobs, it really doesn’t matter."
It’s such a cliché question but how do you cope with being caught up in the pressure of your pictures being validated on Instagram?
I mean it’s hard. Everyone cares and honestly you probably should care. Instagram originally boomed in popularity from photographers like us. Like before it became Kylie Jenner’s app, and a place for people to fake that their life is perfect, it was the photographers app. When Instagram first came out it was geared towards photographers, those were pretty much the original influencers. Back then when you would make an account the algorithm was geared toward all emerging photographers and I know people to this day that were a suggested user on Instagram’s actual account and got like 50,000 followers alone just from being on that list, that was really like striking gold. Originally when the app first started becoming popular, and wasn’t yet owned by Facebook, and wasn’t as “social”, there “thing” was to suggest exclusively photographers. Now the algorithm has changed and it’s become set towards your own interests. It’s hard to admit but I mean you should care about it. The app is easily the best platform to get your work out there. The truth is that 90% of people don’t wanna look at your fu*king website even if they like your work. So Instagram is the perfect place for it to casually hang in their news feeds. I have some friends who have a relatively high number of followers and they’ll get comments from art galleries saying “Hey we like your work send us an email” so it’s really like a business thing. You shouldn’t live and die by it, but it can open whole doors for you. The pressure is always there.
"Back then when you would make an account the algorithm was geared toward all emerging photographers and I know people to this day that were a suggested user on Instagram’s actual account and got like 50,000 followers alone just from being on that list”
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Do you ever wake up, look at the closest and think “Who the fuck do I want to be today?”
All the time. I mean if you’re young and living in New York City you care about what you’re wearing I don’t care who you are! I’d say I have that range which is geared to what I’m doing socially that day. I’m an assistant for this artist in Chelsea as a part time job, and on those days I’ll put on like a turtleneck and a denim jacket, hide my tattoos and sh*t and then the next day I’ll be going to scan my negatives and I’ll just dress pretty regular hahaha. My mom will always give me shit for cuffing my pants and wearing a beanie, like mom I promise you this isn’t weird, this is what people are doing!
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I think it’s cool if you’re a photographer and you detach from micromanaging to perfection on Instagram, sometimes ya gotta let it go.
I mean dude its weird cause I try not to care, but you can’t just not care. It’s going to bug me no matter what.
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I’ve recently been super fascinated with Gunner Stahl’s work, and how he casually just became one of the most influential photographers after buying a camera from his friend at a party. I mean, yeahhhh, I don’t even know what I’m really asking, but what are your thoughts on him?
It’s just that special thing; it’s really one of those subconscious moments of magic. It’s kind of similar to what I was saying about picking a project where it kind of just hits you. That’s a guy who is a perfect example of that. I mean, a lot of people would argue that his style isn’t hard, and you know he’s just taking a picture with his flash or whatever but there’s something to be said about that; the guy started taking his pictures and he knows exactly what’s good, and where the magic is. You can see that in his work. He just kind of started taking pictures of his rapper friends and he had the eye to look at those pictures and be like “Oh this is great, I’m on to something” and then he had the discipline to know what to do next.
What’s the most memorable experience you’ve documented with a camera?
Hmm, I mean I guess the easiest answer would be to talk about photos I’ve gotten from documenting important political moments, but a lot of it is filled with just simple moments of memories that are just important to me; like driving out three hours to the middle of nowhere and listening to music and being very intimate in the sense of being alone and focusing on taking pictures. That’s likely why those pictures are so memorable, sometimes the pictures aren’t even great I just enjoy the time and the process so much.
I kind of get anxious and die a thousand times over when I think about trying to get all my projects out in a single lifetime. Do you have a particular stressor?
I will tip my hat off to myself here because I’m just a super-super low stress person. Like it’s partly because I come from a family who tend to be stressed a lot. A lot of my extended family are just super stressed out people and when you’re growing up you either just completely accept or reject your ways and I have rejected everything of that nature and I’m just so low stress to the point where you could not pay me to care about certain things. It usually works out well, as long as I always make sure I’m caring about the right things.
When does anything that you started doing solely out of enjoyment become something that you start to worry about?
Well it’s a weird contradiction because photography doesn't stress me out ever but, the only time it does is when I get paid for it because anything I’m getting paid for I f*cking hate doing. F*ck, I probably shouldn’t say that on the record… Like I take pictures because I love it, not because I want to make a ton of money. If I wanted to make a ton of money I’d go out and become a doctor or something.
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Inside the World of Hip Hop's Top Photographer | HYPEBEAST Diaries: GUNNER STAHL
Jake Thompson/Shot by Astra Photo
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Do you believe in judging the quality of a photograph based off how much of a buzz or positive feedback you receive from people?
It’s weird how the world works. I kind of took a strong look at my own pictures that got a couple hundred likes and compared them with a photographer with like 80,000 followers or whatever, and I don’t mean this in a negative way but I realized that there is no difference in quality between this work and that work, it’s just that that person’s audience has found them and I don’t have that. But hey that’s fine with me, I’m okay with that.
You took this amazing picture of a group of boys riding through Lower Manhattan, what and how?! Your angle is insane?!
I had seen this group riding around my area in Lower Manhattan quite a few times in the fall, so the first real sunny day we got in 2019 I went out hoping to catch some photos of them in action.
About an hour into walking around and they came blasting down the corner a few blocks down and I started getting ready. I wanted as slow a shutter speed as possible while handholding so that I could get some good motion blur because for me these images were about action/movement and the sense of feeling rather than the actual details of the photograph. I crouched down so I was eye level with their bikes and started shooting. At first I was looking from the viewfinder and continuously shooting, but looking through the camera can ruin my depth perception paired with controlling your bike while popping a wheelie is quite hard, I almost got hit by the first few guys. So I decided to stand up to make sure I didn’t run into anyone and just shot continuously from the hip until the group of about 100 all rode past.
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What’s one cool thing that needs to be brought back?
I think a lot of the late 70’s & 80’s music needs to come back, like the kind of stuff my mom would listen to when she used to go to bars when she was young. I’ve been so into that disco sh*t right now, I’m even wearing a Whitney Houston t-shirt right now hahaha.
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Worst Logistical aspect of being a photographer?
Hmm, wait fuck, I can’t remember who this quote is from but there was someone who was saying that the act of photography in itself is super invasive and that you’re essentially robbing that moment from that point in time and you’re no longer letting it be organic. It’s the same conflict you’ll hear people talking about with filming a concert through a phone screen, like you’re not even present anymore. I feel that way with photographs sometimes, as if the act of pressing the shutter is removing the intimacy of the moment between my subject and I.
What’s the journey of photography been like thus far and what lesson do you hold closest to you?
I would say that photography, like any art form or anything in life, is up and down. The ups are great enough for me to want to do this for the foreseeable future and hopefully forever. There are times where you don’t get a lot of great photos, or you get into a creative slump, and you can get a little down on yourself and your confidence shakes. If it’s something you’re passionate about those highs of taking a great photo are just magic. There’s nothing on the planet that can even remotely compare. A lesson that I hold close to me is from a quote from Gary Winogrand; all things are photographable and if you can’t see it, wherever you are, then you’re not looking hard enough. I think this is something I’ve held onto for a long time because before I lived in New York I thought that living here was the only way to do street-photography, and then now that I moved here all of a sudden I want to do landscapes and I sorta realized I had it all backwards. So you know it’s an important lesson to remind yourself that there’s always a story or a project in front of your face. You just need to be able to search hard enough to find it.
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What creative or non-creative thoughts consume the most amount of your time and brain capacity?
Most of the time they are creative thoughts. I’m not really a high-stress person so I’m usually not thinking about other things, I’m not stressed or worried about things really outside of photography. I’m in school right now for a degree in photography so the curriculum and my daily life is all pretty heavily centered around art. Outside of that I eat, sleep, and breath photography. Other than that, my thoughts are pretty run of the mill stuff; friends, family, sports, movies, just like everybody else. A lot of the time, even when I’m doing nothing, I think really hard a lot of the time and I keep a journal to write down my thoughts and get things down. It helps hash-out some of the things that I’m working through so the next time I go shoot I have a little bit more intent and I’m more proactive in a sense.
"But yeah that’s probably my craziest photo story, the time Bruce Willis was going to kill me and blow up the building."
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Tell us a photography story that’s going to make people actually want to tell their friends to read this interview.
So back when I was living in Chicago I was really inclined to you know… “roof topping”, and getting cool views of the city. So one night we went onto this rooftop and there was a fire escape on the backside of the alley, so we walk all the way up, it was probably around midnight. Everything was going well, and then we hear what sounds like a helicopter flying above us. We see this helicopter flying really-really low which was pretty odd, and it also had a spot light on it so we figured it was a police chopper maybe looking for someone and we definitely didn’t think it was for us, people did this roof-topping stuff all the time. So then, it kind of flies away and my two friends eventually start walking down, it was this long thing of stairs so they wanted to get a head start. I’m putting my tripod away, which takes a couple of minutes, and I start to hear the helicopter again. Before heading down I want to quickly grab a picture for my Snapchat and right after taking it I swear to god the fucking helicopter flies below and in-between the two buildings like 100 feet from the ground! I was so shocked, and I started freaking out so I start running towards the fire escape because obviously I had no clue what was going but in my head the first thing that I thought was that there was a terrorist attack happening. I’m freaking out and I’m running down the stairs and about a flight or two down I see the road is closed off and I remember that a couple days before in the same area I saw Bruce Willis walking around filming some action movie. I saw a truck with a camera mounted on the it, so then I figured it was for the movie. But yeah that’s probably my craziest photo story, the time Bruce Willis was going to kill me and blow up the building.
