Office Hours

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi everybody. My name's Giselle and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University. You're listening to Office Hours, and today I'm here with Adrianna. Adrianna, what's up?

Adrianna Elias:
Hi, how are you?

Giselle Kowalski:
I'm good, how are you?

Adrianna Elias:
Good.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, so you got to speak with Jason Reed, one of the photography professor here at Texas State. Not the, but he is a professor.

Adrianna Elias:
One of them.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, exactly. How'd that go?

Adrianna Elias:
Really awesome. He is the exact person you would think of when you think photography professor. It was really cool going in to meet him. We talked a lot about pushing yourself out of your own bubble and your boundaries. I thought that was really awesome. We bonded on that a little bit.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, it was an awesome conversation. I love sitting in and hearing you guys talk about it and just vibe, but yeah, we hope you guys enjoyed this conversation with Adrianna and Jason Reed.

Adrianna Elias:
Can you introduce yourself and what you do here at Texas State?

Jason Reed:
My name is Jason Reed and I'm a photography professor at Texas State. I'm also a fellow at the Center for the Study of the Southwest.

Adrianna Elias:
I'm going to ask you a silly question to get started as an icebreaker. What's your ultimate sandwich?

Jason Reed:
I like an Italian sandwich with the peppers. I like the sweet peppers, a great Italian sandwich.

Adrianna Elias:
That's solid. There's The Soprano at Ikes. Have you had that?

Jason Reed:
No.

Adrianna Elias:
It's a huge Italian sandwich. It's really good. I might have to lean Italian too. Let's get started on where you are now. What's your first memory of having a camera?

Jason Reed:
That would be when I was probably 7 or so. I always try to think of my childhood now, I have a 9-year-old and a 7-year-old, so like, oh wait, when I was that age, I was doing this, I think around 7 or so. I had a little point-and-shoot camera. It's actually sitting up there on the shelf somewhere. It was called a Snappy Q and it was just a little point-and-shoot film camera, so this is in the ’80s, so no digital. My dad was a pretty serious amateur photographer, so cameras were around and there were a lot of pictures being made of family stuff, vacations out in the field, things like that, and so I saw my dad do it a lot. My grandpa had Polaroids and Brownie cameras also, which are up there, some of them.

Adrianna Elias:
Those are so cool.

Jason Reed:
This was all film, of course.

Adrianna Elias:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Reed:
So the early days, I'd say three or four years ago, I actually was going through my parents' stuff, looking at old pictures, showing my daughters and stuff, and I found some of those first pictures I made out of the car window.

Adrianna Elias:
I'm trying to think of when I first picked up a camera.

Jason Reed:
Was it a camera phone?

Adrianna Elias:
Probably actually. Or the little camcorders that you flip open. It was that kind of thing. When was the moment that you knew this was it? When you knew photography was your passion?

Jason Reed:
I guess in graduate school actually, after I decided already to try photography. I got an undergraduate degree in geography from University of Texas. And so I was interested in photography from a young age, like I said, and I was making pictures and in high school I guess I was the photography kid in some ways. I was on the newspaper and whatever, but I never really did what they wanted. I just made weird pictures and weird pictures of my friends and stuff like that. I grew up in San Angelo, which is this little West Texas town, and I was trying to find the weirdest films I could, and read poetry and it was a kind of real little-

Adrianna Elias:
Absorb art all you could?

Jason Reed:
I was like, I watched "Dead Poets Society" over and over again. Now I look back and I watch it again and it's kind of like, "Oh, this is kind of cheesy." But when you're in West Texas and you're searching for something different, that was this outlet. I was interested in something else, but I decided I really wanted to study history and I was interested in the history of the land and all of that, so geography was my undergraduate major, but I had really great geography professors that encouraged me to make photographs as geographic exploration, and geography and photography really aren't that far apart. A lot of it's about looking and so they really encouraged that and they said, "Think about going to graduate school for photography." And so that's what I did and so it wasn't really until then I was like, OK, I'm going to do this. I think my dad was a salesman for a pharmaceutical company, but he really wanted to be an artist, so he was like, "Yeah, go for it." He kind of wanted me to... I wouldn't say he lived through me, although a little bit.

Adrianna Elias:
Just live your dream because he couldn't.

Jason Reed:
Yeah, he tried and it just didn't, he had to go get a corporate job. He, I think has regrets about not really going for it, and so he was always like, yeah, just take the risk.

Adrianna Elias:
My parents are the same way, so I love that. What was the hardest lesson that you had to unlearn when you were in college?

Jason Reed:
I had to unlearn that school was uninteresting. In high school, I didn't, again, kind of connected to this idea of searching for resources and movies, and I wouldn't say my high school teachers in West Texas were that knowledgeable of culture, and so I felt lost and I thought school was pointless and uninteresting, and I went to college because it was just expected. When I went to college, it was like, oh, school is actually really amazing. I just fell in love with the world of ideas that professors were engaged with and really interesting classes about urban geography and historical geography and took all the kinds of things I could take. I took Chicano art history classes, I took astronomy classes. I was just like I could stay forever, unlearning that school was boring or a pain.

Adrianna Elias:
Did you have a mentor in school?

Jason Reed:
In college, I had a few, yeah, in geography. I was just talking to my wife about this morning, wondering where he is now. I saw him a few years ago, but Professor Davies was a geography professor. When I was there at UT, he probably had already been there 25 years. I mean, I really bugged him a lot. I knocked on his door like every day and he always invited me in and just told me weird stuff about research he was doing. He was from Wales and so he did a lot of research around coal mining. Actually I got to study abroad with him my final year in England and we drove the charter bus to Wales and into the little town that he grew up in and he had the guy drive us by his house and we just stopped and then he just told us what it looked like in the ’50s growing up there and talked about his dad coming home from the coal mines, and I did a summer honors class or something with him, like an independent study kind of situation, and I went in and I was like all organized.
I'm like, "I'm going to go do this kind of historical geographic analysis of this one neighborhood." And he was like, "No, you're not. You're going to go to the St. John's neighborhood and you're going to write a 20-page paper on that." And I was like, "OK, where's the St. John's neighborhood?" He is like, "Figure it out. Next week, meet with me. Tell me what you saw in the St. John's neighborhood and who you talk to." And so he just blew up my very crafted idea and made me go do something that I didn't expect and I ended up writing my undergrad thesis on St. John's. Also in art history, I minored in art history. I took all these Chicano art history classes with Amelia Malagamba and she just opened my eyes to all kinds of ideas around privilege, around histories of the borderlands that I'd never thought about, histories of West Texas where I was from, that I'd never thought about that really influenced my work today.

Adrianna Elias:
When you're teaching your photography classes, how do you ensure that students are focusing on finding their own style instead of just doing the assignment?

Jason Reed:
That's a good one. I mean, a lot of it's trying to get to know the students as much as you can, trying to unpack their influences, where are they coming from? So you have to meet them where they're at. At the same time I just mentioned with Davies, you have to throw things at them and be like, "You're going to go do this now." My assignments tend to be open-ended. I mean they get more open-ended as the classes advance, but even in Photo I, for example, for a portrait project, go make three portraits. Well, I'm not telling you who to photograph, and we talk about that. It's a lot about you're deciding as the photographer, who do I point the camera at and how do I engage with them? Who are those people? How do I position them? So there's a world of possibilities in that, that I'm not dictating.
So I try to be the kind of banks of the river so that they can navigate how they want and flow how they want and explore the areas that they're really curious about because that's the most important thing is if they're not doing something they're curious about — I mean this is true in photography and sociology, and history, and marketing, and everything — if you're not curious about the thing you're exploring, you're not going to care, and you're not going to do a great job at it. So it's trying to open them up to what their curiosities might be within the confines and limitations of the assignment.

Adrianna Elias:
Can you tell when someone, I guess put more effort to find a style rather than just doing the assignment?

Jason Reed:
You can tell when people mail it in and sometimes they mail it in because they're super stressed and I mean, this is something we really learned with COVID, I think we got to see into the lives of students more and really I think a lot of professors have come out of that really trying to meet the students where they're at even more maybe. I think I was always inclined to try to do that, but even more now.

Adrianna Elias:
What's something that your younger self would not believe about yourself today?

Jason Reed:
That I'm working at a school, teaching. Well, my younger self would've been in the NBA, if I had a choice. I would've thought I would've gone into something to do with sports. Again, I was just not connected to the academic side of things. To me it was like basketball was going to be my pathway, but it just didn't when I got to high school, and I became weirder and it didn't mesh with the kind of West Texas sports basketball culture, which is really football, with a basketball, but definitely I would've thought I'd be a coach or something, or in sports somehow.

Adrianna Elias:
I see that never, I always tell my mom, she's like, "You should be a professor." And I was like, "I couldn't imagine it." But I never know in 20 years where I'll be. What's your motto when it comes to pushing out creative work?

Jason Reed:
Slow.

Adrianna Elias:
Slow.

Jason Reed:
I'm really slow.

Adrianna Elias:
I feel like that's good though. Meditated.

Jason Reed:
It depends on what I'm doing, I guess. For my own work, I'm really slow because I'm indecisive. I think it's good to be slow. There's a photographer, Henry Wessel, who just passed away a couple years ago, who I really love. He shoots all this film and then he works on all these prints and he's so behind, five years behind, so he is like working on prints from pictures he made five years before because when you make a photograph, you love it, it's so great, but if you wait a year, you realize this other one is actually better. And so that distance and that slow pathway towards making I think is important. On other projects like Borderline Collective, which is this education, art, community-based organization, went to Washington State with my colleague Mark Menjivar who teaches in studio, and we were working with farm worker families in Washington State in the Yakima Valley. Those kinds of projects have to have a quicker turnaround. It depends on the projects, so I don't know if I have a standard motto-

Adrianna Elias:
But for your personal work, you prefer to go slow?

Jason Reed:
For my personal work, slow and steady.

Adrianna Elias:
You've published multiple books that are based on your photography in your hometown and the surrounding areas. What has the process of getting your work published been like?

Jason Reed:
I come from a DIY kind of culture, and partly that's just growing up in West Texas. I didn't go down a streamlined art path to get access to blue chip galleries and tons of money and things like that. In terms of the books that I've put out and zines and newspapers and all these kinds of things, a lot of it's like scrapping money together, little grants here, my own money. There's that component. And then in terms of the labor of it and the production of it's really, it's like long-term projects. So I just put out this book called "Field Work," which is pictures of really of my father-in-law more than anything, and basically they've been on that same plot of land for three generations or so, farming. It's really kind of a meditative project, but it was basically 20 years or so of photographing to make that book.

Adrianna Elias:
Do you publish it on your own? I don't know. How do you publish those sort of things?

Jason Reed:
So the "Field Work" book I did self-publish, I just started my own publishing house called Victory in the Wilderness Museum, and I put my book out first, and then I've published other stuff since then. We had a visiting artist, Hope Mora, come last semester, who is an alum of our program and has gone on to do amazing things and makes photographs of Pecos, Texas, where she's from, under Victory in the Wilderness Museum, I published her book in collaboration with the Center for Southwest Studies, so I used my first book to kind of launch this other project where I could publish other people's work. The "Borderline Collective" book that I just published was with Specter Books out of Germany, and that was kind of a more traditional proposals sent around to different publishers. So I've done it different ways.

Adrianna Elias:
That's cool. What advice, if any, would you give me as I move through my college career?

Jason Reed:
Well, you're already doing something good by doing a podcast. That's awesome. Again, it's like doing stuff. I mean, that would be the advice I give any student, that DIY thing. You got to make things happen while you're in college. Go to class. Let's start there. Don't skip, take it in. You don't have to agree with anything. Debate your professors. They love nothing more. Challenge us, bring up ideas, question us. Knock on your professors' doors and ask them questions. Go to office hours.

Adrianna Elias:
I need to do that more. That's my goal this semester is to go actually talk to my professors like this.

Jason Reed:
You're doing it right now.

Adrianna Elias:
Right? I know, but when it's them, it's like they're like icons. They're like the people. Yeah.

Jason Reed:
Yeah. I get it.

Adrianna Elias:
Yeah. So lastly, what's the next big thing for you? What are you looking forward to?

Jason Reed:
I have a little fellowship with the Portal of Texas History, which is this online database of images and records from across Texas. It's like a clearinghouse. They've gotten all these libraries and stuff to digitize all these records and stuff, and so I got a little fellowship with them to work on a book about oil, so that's what I'm going to be working on over the next year.

Adrianna Elias:
Nice.

Jason Reed:
Yeah.

Adrianna Elias:
It's a big project. Oil's huge.

Jason Reed:
Yeah, so I got to figure it out.

Adrianna Elias:
Thank you for doing this.

Jason Reed:
Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate you coming.

Adrianna Elias:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Office Hours. We hope you enjoyed this conversation and make sure you tune in next time to learn more about the experiences of our amazing Texas State faculty, and also, remember to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube at @TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communication at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the host and guest, not of Texas State University. Once again, I'm Adrianna and I'll see you next time. Bye.