PUBLISHED BY CHRIS BROWN
AMERICAN INSTANT FILM PHOTOGRAPHS 2006 - 2016
116
EPILOGUE
I remember getting that call from Jason like it was yesterday. At the time I was serving as Editor-in-Chief of Anthem, an arts and culture magazine we aimed at making special in every way possible, from the printing techniques to the subjects we featured inside. Jason had found us and saw the magazine as the perfect home to showcase his rise in the film photography world. Needless to say, we were humbled. What transpired was a five-year working relationship that sparked a deep friendship with a fervent love for photography at its core. Stories abound of our day with Dennis Hopper and the subsequent theft and recovery of that famous Polaroid. Architectural photographer Julius Shulman made sure to remind Jason how important he was to the world and was surprisingly impressed by the 8x10 Polaroid he handed him. James McAvoy once posed for a portrait admiring Jason's delicate analog approach he took in capturing the intensity of that moment. I could go on but I'll stop at the time we dedicated ten pages to a series he affectionately called ‘Instant America’, a lot of what inspired the content for this book. For that particular story, Jason hit the road with his large format cameras and stacks of Polaroid film capturing sights, scenes and the people he met on a one-of-one piece of emulsion. The feeling evoked in those photos made readers figuratively pull off the road and take notice of an old gas station, or an empty highway. The warm tones of the Polaroid film romanticized light invisible to the naked eye while the inky tendencies of the black and white immortalized the mood of each landscape like a tedious charcoal drawing. These films are a medium in and of themselves that tell a timeless story anyone can understand and be inspired to ask more questions. Some are imperfectly perfect but what you see is what you get with this process, moments that are totally pure. “I also liked the idea of the one-off factor, and there being no negative, darkroom or computer manipulation involved,” he added from our interview back in 2007. This book is the continuation of Jason’s story and marks the next chapter in an ongoing narrative shown from a unique point of view. Signs will fade, faces will change and instant film will become a thing of the past. However, one thing will remain the same. You can count on seeing Jason out there with his old cameras making memories that will live on as both a love letter to America and the film that inspired this body of work.
- Dustin A. Beatty Editor?in?Chief of Anthem Magazine (1999?2009) & Photographer
All photographs made with multi-format Polaroid and Fuji instant peel-apart films, printed for this publication at actual size.
Book Design / Hand Painted Titles by Chris Brown All images Š 2016 Jason Lee. All Rights Reserved. / Copyright Š 2016 Refueled. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Printed in the United States of America