Seeing People Through Light and Shadow: An Interview with Chassity Jackson

Twins came from a single afternoon on a photo walk. I was not trying to make a statement about identity, just attempting to document the specific way two people can be the same and completely foreign to each other simultaneously. The chiaroscuro was intentional. 

Light as the thing that chooses what is seen and winning EPA Gold in Fine Art Portraiture confirmed what I already suspected: that work made from genuine curiosity about people lands differently than work made from concept alone. It lands in the body, not just the eye.

I ask myself one question while in post-production late at night: Does this image have an argument? 

Not a mood. Not an aesthetic.

An actual argument, something it is insisting the viewer consider. If I cannot articulate what the image is saying in one sentence, then I feel it is not ready, or I need to revisit the image from a different perspective or vantage point. Twins was ready. The argument was: what does it mean to recognise yourself in someone else and still feel the distance?

My mom, she picked out my very first camera, which was a Polaroid. I adored my camera, but at that moment I never knew that photography would become something that I would pursue long-term.

Botanical abstraction by far! This genre allows me the leeway to create something unorthodox where the noise of the world stops telling me how to see art. I am always trying to find the image underneath the image.

iPhone - full stop. Not as a limitation but as a philosophy. Now I also love analogue, where I use my Minolta. Nonetheless, I believe that the best camera is the one that removes the distance between the seeing and the making. 

My iPhone is always in my hand, and when I feel the light and the moment is right, I am already shooting. The constraint has taught me more about composition and intention than any equipment upgrade ever could.

Seen not by me, but by the image. I want them to feel the specific discomfort of recognising something true about themselves in an art piece or series that was never about them.  Personally, that is the moment fine art actually works.

Waiting and shutting out the external noise. Also having the courage to see and capture what others have dismissed as ordinary.

Cultural beauty, things that are in the liminal space of becoming.

Caravaggio was not a photographer, which is the point.  He understood that light is not decoration, as it is the argument.

Submit the work that frightens you slightly, not the safe edit and certainly not the technically perfect image that says nothing. Submit the one that feels too personal and too strange to win anything because that is usually the one that does. I believe that juries remember work that insists on itself.

Stop waiting for better equipment and start asking better questions. The question should be: What am I actually trying to say? Frankly, the equipment is irrelevant until you can answer that.

Post-production is not finished. It is the second conversation with the image and the shot is the first draft. Twins demanded hours, which took several iterations of tonal work to achieve the chiaroscuro that the natural light only suggested.

I believe that AI will accelerate the production of beautiful images, not accelerate the development of an artistic point of view. 

The photographers whose work survives this AI era will be the ones whose images are irreducibly themselves, work that could only have come from a specific person standing in a specific place asking a specific question. Personally, I am focused on making work that is too particular to be replicated.

Great question. My answer would be that I’m still learning and discovering, but it would probably be related to nature.