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[ April 10th, 2006 ]
Jeffrey Lamont Brown was at the top of the 20,561-foot Mount Chimborazo in central Ecuador when he realized he had found his life's work. A disaffected student on an extended leave from engineering school, he was climbing hard with some friends, trying to figure out his next move on the mountain and in life. Then, out of the blue, he found his footing.
"Here I had come all this way to climb mountains, and it suddenly occurred to me that the highlight of the trip was photographing the farmers who were making cheese near base camp," Brown recalled recently. "Learning about their lives and capturing them on film was more thrilling to me than summiting those peaks." That passion for documenting people's lives led Brown into the exacting, adrenalyne-fueled world of photojournalism. For the next 10 years, working sometimes as a staff newspaper photographer, and sometimes as a free-lancer for publications such as Time, Life and National Geographic, he shared stories of everyday life, and pursued documentary projects on social issues such as drug addiction, affordable housing, education and health care. In 1997, he was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for a photo essay on illegal immigration.
"It is a rare privilege to enter into people's lives and tell their stories," Brown said. "The range of human experience and emotion never ceases to humble and amaze me." Yet even as Brown relished documenting people's lives, he began to tire of the solitary life of a photojournalist. More and more, he found himself self-assigning projects -- portrait sessions, fashion shoots -- that were collaborative in nature. "Documentary photographers are lone wolves," he said. "I like to work with other creative people." In 1998, after moving to San Diego, he decided to branch out into advertising photography, developing a personal style that is grounded in photojournalism but also infused with traditional art-photography aesthetics. "My images spring from the point at which photojournalism meets art," Brown said. "I'm capturing something authentic, but filtered through my point of view, and my knowledge of art and photographic history. My current sport and active lifestyle book includes images of a woman who's the top masters' sprinter in the United States and a man who weighs 380 pounds."
To achieve his signature style, Brown uses a Canon 1DS MK 2 and deploys classic photojournalistic techniques on set or in the field. Then, in a process he likens to traditional darkroom photography, he burns and dodges images to calibrate the emotional pitch of the images. "Master darkroom printers have always done this stuff. Steichen scraped his prints with a knife and bleached out parts of them," Brown said. "I use digital photography and raw work flow. But my process mimics those old-time darkroom manipulations. I'm not cutting and pasting things together. I'm simply using the computer to replicate traditional darkroom techniques." The advent of digital technology has encouraged many photographers to alter their images, with mixed results. But now, Brown says, "there is a hunger for authenticity out there," both in the field of advertising and the public at large. In the last few years, Brown's documentary-based images have attracted the notice of art directors from New York to Singapore. Ivan Davies, Art Director, Doner Cardwell Hawkins in London says, " Working with Jeffrey Brown in San Diego is one of the most pleasurable experiences I've ever had as an art director."
"A lot of people are trying to work at the point where documentary meets art photography," Brown said. "The difference is I have 15 years of photojournalism to back it up." >> See more work from Jeffrey Lamont Brown >> See other member spotlights on the member spotlight index >> Find out more on how to become an altpick.com member |
