A Little About Jason

From an early age, Jason LeBrasseur was captivated by light. Not simply its brightness, but its behavior: how it bends, scatters, interferes, reveals, and conceals. Encouraged by his grandfather, who introduced him to electrical theory, mechanical systems, and foundational and advanced physics, including quantum physics, Jason developed a fascination with the structure of the unseen. Light was not merely illumination. It was information.

As a child, he designed and constructed a helium neon laser and power supply from scratch, replicating the double slit experiment and building a working interferometer. These early explorations were not only scientific exercises but foundational studies in perception itself. The same curiosity that once examined wave interference now informs his photographic practice. Light, to him, is both subject and medium. It defines space, mood, and memory.

Photography gradually became the discipline through which these early questions found lasting expression. What began as technical curiosity evolved into fine art documentation and historic preservation. Jason approaches photography as an intentional act of record keeping. Rural barns, abandoned gas stations, industrial relics, lakeshore dunes, winter shorelines, and historic rail equipment are not casual subjects. They are vulnerable artifacts of cultural and mechanical history. Through careful composition and restrained post processing, he documents them before they disappear.

His volunteer work with the Steam Railroading Institute, including involvement with Pere Marquette 1225, deepened this commitment to preservation. Directly maintaining historic machinery reinforced the urgency of documentation. Steel corrodes. Timber collapses. Landscapes shift. Photographs endure. His images serve simultaneously as artistic interpretation and archival evidence, preserving structures and equipment that may not survive another generation.

Jason’s photographic process reflects discipline and deliberation. He prioritizes crafting the image in camera, studying the fall of light, tonal transitions, shadow structure, and compositional balance before pressing the shutter. His background in traditional darkroom techniques, including black and white development and color processing, continues to shape his digital workflow. He avoids presets and one click aesthetics. Instead, he makes subtle, manual tonal and color adjustments to align the final image with what he observed at the moment of capture. The aim is not stylization, but fidelity to light and form.

Historic preservation through photography requires patience. Many of his subjects are transitional: weathered wood, rusted rivets, fading signage, snow dissolving into sand, dune grass bending in lake wind. These states are temporary. They require return visits, seasonal observation, and attentiveness to subtle change. Over time, his work becomes a longitudinal visual archive, documenting both physical structures and the passage of time itself.

Diagnosed with ADD and ADHD as a young child, Jason learned early that his mind operates through rapid pattern recognition, nonlinear association, and intense focus. Rather than viewing ADHD as a limitation, he has come to understand it as a central force in his creative life. Hyperfocus allows him to study light behavior, surface texture, and compositional relationships with unusual depth. Rapid idea generation enables him to connect industrial forms, natural landscapes, and historical narratives in ways that may not be immediately apparent. Relentless curiosity drives him to return repeatedly to subjects that others might overlook.

The same traits often misunderstood in ADHD, sustained hyperfocus, accelerated conceptual linking, and constant mental motion, have fueled his success across both artistic and technical disciplines. Whether engineering complex control systems, designing software, building custom electronics, or documenting a collapsing barn at dusk, he brings an ability to see patterns within complexity. His ADHD provides an intuitive capacity to dive deeply into detail while simultaneously perceiving broader structural relationships.

Photography, in particular, offers a form of alignment. The act of composing an image narrows distraction into clarity. The external world becomes structured through framing, exposure, and light. For Jason, documenting historic spaces and mechanical artifacts is not only preservation of subject matter, but a way of stabilizing perception itself. The camera becomes both instrument and anchor.

Beyond photography, this same cognitive intensity has informed his work in engineering, railway systems, large scale public light and multimedia installations, and open source development. Across disciplines, his approach remains consistent: observe carefully, understand structure, build thoughtfully, and refine deliberately. He is passionate about reframing ADHD not as deficiency, but as a different and often powerful way of processing the world, capable of extraordinary creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, and sustained focus when understood and supported.

Self taught in nearly every discipline he has pursued, Jason’s life reflects an unbroken thread of inquiry. From childhood quantum physics and laser experiments to contemporary fine art documentation, he remains guided by the same question: how does light reveal structure, history, and meaning? Through disciplined observation and careful craftsmanship, he continues to build a body of photographic work that honors place, time, and the quiet systems that shape the American landscape.