Natives
"The SL system is the most important camera system of my career and as an artist."
Jason Roman
Jason Roman
Jason Roman
"A motivating force, with this camera in hand, I recently began photographing something completely out of my wheelhouse; an exhilarating and terrifying space to be in as an artist. Since picking up my first camera, I have always been drawn to the streets of New York City - the people, the architecture and buildings, the crumbs littering the pavement.
But through this viewfinder, I saw something new one day and felt the birth of a new photography project. A tool that helps you evolve and challenge yourself as an artist is priceless and the SL3 not only matches my drive and curiosity, but it encourages me as I push my boundaries. Taking portraits of pigeons is a photographic challenge but the resolution and autofocus of the SL3 expands the possibilities. I’ve been able to experiment and explore without testing the camera's boundaries, just my own."
How did you develop the concept for this project?
This project is something that had been sitting in my subconscious for a few years now. I noticed a couple of years ago that I had actively avoided taking pictures of clichés around NYC. I felt it was important to make work that wasn’t about the obvious things that made up life in NYC. This mindset was holding me back from creating a body of work that really embraced my roots as a New Yorker. I remember looking at another photographer’s work, and they had such a beautiful picture of a pigeon, and it woke me up out of my sleep. How did I not have a good picture of a pigeon in my archive? That thought sat in my mind for years about everything that was unmistakably New York. It led me down a path of photographing everything from bubble gum on the concrete to shoes hanging on a wire. I realized that I wasn’t making images for all the other photographers in New York; instead, I was making images for all the people that don’t own cameras and have never been to New York. It wasn’t long after this new way of thinking I got the call for the SL3 launch. I was staring at a pigeon out the window of a taxi, and the timing couldn’t have been better.
Why did you feel this was an important story to tell?
This story is important to me because it is my story. As a native New Yorker, I’m learning to listen to what my home is throwing at me for inspiration and trying my best to turn that into art.
Can you share more about your creative process?
My process was mostly trial and error here. I shot every day that I could, and I would come back and review the images hoping I’d stumble on an aesthetic that felt right. I was in the experimental phase trying everything because I wasn’t sure what this new style of pigeon portraits would look like. The day that I stumbled on the final aesthetic was a great day, but it took thousands of images and experimenting before I found this very painterly aesthetic created by shooting with the right lens at the right distance.
Can you tell us a little about the visual approach to this project?
I felt it was important to make this project just about the pigeons. I wanted to be in their world as they gathered. In the end, the visual approach was to create something that felt like a painting, so it was important to use an extreme telephoto lens with a very shallow depth of field that produced results that are painterly and evoke the canvas. I think that is why I’ve chosen to shoot mostly vertically. I feel when I shoot horizontally, I’m telling a story as a horizontal frame is reminiscent of cinema. A vertical frame feels like a painting.
What do you hope others will take away from this project?
I hope that this project will remind people that you can find inspiration in the most obvious of things. Sometimes our experience with familiar spaces can be a passive one. This project is a reminder to reengage in the mundane things we overlook.
