Jason Gardner

Biography

Jason Gardner is an American photographer, writer, and documentarian. He tells stories, using photography and writing, within the framework of Visual Anthropology. He is passionate about culture, ritual, and music and how all three impact human expression.

In 2013, Jason published A Flower in the Mouth, a book of photography and writing about the culture, music and rituals of Carnival in Pernambuco, Brazil.

Jason has continued with the project entitled We the Spirits, documenting other Carnaval celebrations in over 16 countries, with photography, video, and selected interviews of the participants and culture-bearers of this tradition.

Jason’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Photo District News, New York Magazine, NPR.org, and SPIN Magazine. 

A ten-page portfolio of his work was published in GEO Magazine France in March 2022. https://photo.geo.fr/carnaval-du-monde-loeil-du-photographe-jason-gardner-49065

The series was selected as the Top 50 portfolio by Photolucida’s Critical Mass, 2022. https://www.photolucida.org/top-50/jason-gardner/?cm_year=2022

An exhibition of this work is being planned for November 2023 - February 2024 at the Stadthaus in Ulm, Germany. https://stadthaus.ulm.de/

Jason’s work was recently exhibited at the Mois de la Photo OFF Photography festival in Paris. Lincoln Center hosted an exhibition at the Out of Doors Festival. New Orleans Jazz Fest has hosted an exhibition and presentation of his work. Other exhibitions include BY Chatel Galerie Paris, Audacieuse Galerie (Geneva), Bartcelona Gallery (Belgrade), Mairie XVème Paris, Vienna Photo Book Fair, Corridor Elephant (online, France), The Brazilian Consulates General of Los Angeles, San Francisco & NY, Rayko Gallery (San Francisco), Photoville (Brooklyn), PhotoPlace Gallery, Uma Nota Festival Toronto, Art From the Heart, and the Brazilian Endowment for the Arts (BEA) New York. 

Jason divides his time between New York and Paris.

Artist statement

VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY

In my practice, I document visually various aspects of a culture, and how it is celebrated, both venerating traditions and looking forward.

I am interested in what constitutes cultures and most especially how they are celebrated, from honoring traditions to envisaging the future. By focusing on cultural manifestations such as music, dance, festival, and spectacle, as well as symbols, street art, glyphs, costumes, or shrines in a closet, I capture the intangible, visually translating the symbolic connections of what might not be visible at first glance.

Placing my photographic practice within the framework of Visual Anthropology, I hope to tell stories by focusing on cultures, traditions and practices which often happen behind the public’s view. I capture things that build up to define the cultural milieu and community’s regional identities. I look for that ineffable moment of transformation in a ceremony, the traditional song or costume epitomizing regional pride and identity, a symbol representing a culture, these all combine to reflect the culture.

I wish to reveal some of the diversity of the spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional landscape of a community. Making the connections among the various manifestations, to show their relationship with each other, and how they interlock, helps to form my view of the culture I am documenting. These displays of culture are significant, to me, in that they represent one of the more profound ways that humans can express themselves.

QUIET RESONANCE

Listening to a fleeting whisper, sometimes the words are unintelligible, sometimes it seems like an internal, coded exchange.

Tenuous impressions people, places, and events, and things contemplated. There might be a little bit of nostalgia within them; a narrative might manifest itself after a closer look. Don’t question the attraction to each scene, just enjoy the action of relying purely on instinct, often not even directly understand the attraction to the image.

Or I just like them. I don’t have an exact answer why I like them. They call to me. It may not be a loud klaxon. It could be a murmur in a breeze.

These have been the “underdog” images, the quiet ones, those that have seeped up slowly through my other shoots and consciousness, through the years of wandering. It’s often more contemplative work as a counterplay to my other loud, documentary, direct, bright color work.

One should not ask the literal meaning of images but allow them to be a canvas to project stories, be it real or fictional.

Seemingly meaningless, these images are perhaps the most meaningful. Together, they interrogate the way we see and engage with images. They question the relationship, if any, within the sequence of images.

They amplify the mundane.