J Jason Lazarus – Electrons, Gameboys and inspiring others

Welcome to episode 139 of photography insights and I’m your host Andrew Walmsley.  This is the show that interviews people from the photography field from across the globe.

Today I’m really excited to share with you another great force in education and photography recommended by Jonah.  J Jason Lazarus is an educator at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  Not only that but Jason loves interesting alternative or historic processes and having fun.  You can tell from our conversation he is really in to his ability to educate others and keep pushing forward.  He teaches the history of photography and talks about the importance of updating his students with his own work.  It’s all about motivating others but keeping up to date and pushing yourself.

Jason is also part of an “untapped group” where the idea is to meet up in person and provide encouragement and critique for people’s images.  There are so many different projects Jason has worked on, from Mordançage, to chemigrams, cyanotype or shooting on a Gameboy!  Hope you enjoy looking through his array of images.

Anyway, he’s a very approachable guy and we had so much fun, so enjoy this one.  I really struggled to edit this one down as he’s got such a great body of work.  It was even interesting to talk about how different life is because of the lack of sunlight and seasons in Alaska, but alas I had to cut so much.  Maybe I will send running a patreon service and those of you that are crazy can listen to us for hours!  

Here are a few things we discussed:

• playing with processes
• printing van dyke brown
• electron scanning microscope
• macro photography
• cyanotypes
• anna atkins
• mordancage (remember accent on the c)
• gameboy shooting
• dot matrix printers
• chemigram
• inspiring others + pushing you

J Jason Lazarus – links

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/obscuraworksak/

Website – https://obscura-works.com/

Extra content

It only seemed prudent to ask Jason to present some images of the podcast. Some of processes he uses may not make sense until you see the finished product.

We had to cut the interview so I’ve included the 2 light box images – another lovely project he worked on.

Donations

Please don’t forget i’ve launched the KO-FI donation page.  All donations mean a lot to me, i’m trying to blog and experiment with so many more things like cyanotype and lith printing. I can only do this with funds, so please do help, every £1 means so much.

Friends of the show

Large format + medium format cameras – https://chroma.camera

For all your c41 developing needs – https://filmdev.co.uk/

Great and affordable zines from Static Age – https://www.staticage.co.uk/

Shout Out – Kosmo

Don’t forget we mentioned Kosmo’s new film coming your way.  Details on kickstarter here:

Shout Out – Eric Kunsman

Eric and his colleagues are running this opportunity for 100 students who graduated in 2010 or 2011, more details here:

www.MFAphotographyreviews.com