About Jason LeBrasseur

Jason photographs the Great Lakes region - barns, abandoned filling stations, industrial remnants, lakeshore dunes, winter shorelines. Travel extends the work across the wider Midwest and into the South. More recently it has moved toward towns and cities, and the people in them.

The first influence he can name is not a photographer. Edward Hopper's rooms and storefronts taught him that light can be the event rather than the thing that lets you see the event. In his photographs light is not what makes the subject visible. It is the subject.

Stephen Shore and William Eggleston account for most of the rest: ordinary things described plainly, in the light they were actually found in, without being asked to mean more than they do. Alec Soth is why the work has begun to move toward people.

His work sits in the tradition of the New Topographics: ordinary structures photographed straight, description without romance, landscape understood as something people have altered rather than somewhere people go. The move into populated places is a continuation of that rather than a break from it - the same attention turned toward streets and the people occupying them, at the same volume. Nothing in his work is loud.

He photographs people occasionally. The portraits are made the same way as everything else, described rather than styled, and it is the newest part of the work.

He works mostly in black and white, occasionally in color, in series of twelve to twenty images, and prints small - no larger than 13x34" - on fine art papers in his own studio. The prints require standing close. That is deliberate.

He came up on medium and large format, developing and printing his own film, and the habits stayed. He shoots primarily digital now and returns to film periodically. There are no presets in his workflow and no one-click corrections; the adjustments are small, manual, and aimed at what was actually in front of him. He typically works from a tripod with a handheld meter - not because the equipment improves the photograph, but because it slows him down and settles the composition before the shutter rather than after it. He allows himself one or two frames of a subject and then leaves.

None of that is opposed to instinct. It is where instinct comes from. The pictures that arrive without warning - three seconds to pull the camera off the tripod and find the frame - are built by the same eye working faster than deliberation allows. The slow method is the training. The fast frame is what it pays out.

Diagnosed with ADHD as a child, and being what is now termed "twice exceptional" (or "2e"), he has found it to be neither the punchline it usually gets treated as nor the superpower it sometimes gets sold as. The same attention that will spend an hour on how light crosses a single wall is the attention that makes an ordinary day hard to assemble. Photography is one of the few places where the trait is only an asset - the frame narrows the world to something his mind can hold. He says so plainly because most people's understanding of the disorder stops at a joke.

His subjects tend to be transitional: weathered wood, rusted rivets, fading signage, snow melting into the sand, dune grass bent by lake wind. Steel corrodes, timber collapses, photographs remain.