Stats: 29 years-old (recently spent birthday at Trader Vics); hails outta sunny Lilburn, GA; BA in Graphic Design from GSU; plays guitar and sings in ATL band Sealions; avid runner.
The Man Behind the Persona
I recently bought my dad his first camera; a point and click from Walgreen’s for ten bucks.
We had taken a walk over Thanksgiving; the cotton fields near my Gram’s house were covered in frosty snow that cut the land into geometric patterns.
We were watching the sunset when he said, “I wish I could remember this moment forever; there’s so much beauty and history and light in this single moment.”
My dad doesn’t talk like that. But in that instant he articulated the value of capturing an experience in an image, holding on to it and sharing it.
So, I sprung for the wind-up.
Both Pappa Dash and Jason Travis understand the importance of grabbing the essence of a moment, feeling or person within a photo, but JTrav not only does so with the click of a button, he manipulates light and speed and shadow. He’s not a drug-store picture-taker, he’s an artist.
“I do a lot of different things, but I really value myself as a photographer,” JTrav said one eve to Dash. “I’m constantly photographing things; every day I have fun with it somehow.”
With his Persona series JTrav captures the Individual by getting folks to spill the contents of their bookbags, manbags and purses and taking a portrait alongside their everyday possessions.
“It was just kinda an experiment that caught on,” he said. “I love taking portraits of people and comparing and contrasting what they value. There are so many variations of what people think they need.”
It’s a receipt-y, journal-y, you-need-to-clean-up-your-shit kinda peak into someone’s everyday world.
“I was surprised once to see that a friend of mine has a gun,” he said. “Oh, and that a girl had 20 tampons, she said she has them for karmic purposes. Give a tampon, get a tampon.””
The photos force recognition of the idiosyncrasies of the individual: one man’s Star Wars wallet is another guy’s money clip; one chick’s Dostoevsky is another dame’s Elie Wiesel; one granny’s hair pick is another dude’s bike helmet.
JTrav and his Persona series make being a voyeur an anthropological study, one that makes us here at Dash love all of you sicko dweebies even more.
“I just wanna capture the essence of who a person is or at least capture a moment and inspire someone with it. If I can do that then I guess I’ve done my job.”
