WHO?
I’m Jesse Freeman. I am from the U.S. (Maryland), but have been living in Tokyo, Japan for a few decades now. It was here I got heavy into classic film and literature and so when my late friend Alani Cruz helped me get a Ricoh GR1s in 2010, I immediately begin to incorporate what I learned in the two mediums into the development of my photographic style. My very first photograph that I took that made me fall in love with the medium was inspired by Ozu Yasijuro.
WHAT?
Just the everyday really as I always have a camera with me and am always shooting. Simplistic but I always appreciate that old Winogrand adage, “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” It is that curiosity to see that makes photography such an endless attraction to me.
WHERE?
Wherever I am. I will say location does dictate my shooting a bit. When I am back home in Baltimore my work becomes a lot more personal and community oriented, whereas Tokyo it is a bit more objective, distant, geometric, which is natural being a foreigner. This is a generalization but overall I experience new places best through a camera lens that is then often backed by any cinematic/literary references of the area’s culture.
WHEN?
Whenever. Though I do notice daytime shots are mostly on my Leica M3 and night time is on whatever point and shoot that I haven’t broken yet. No specific time though really, if a shot is there I take it.
WHY?
Just going back to that Winogrand quote. But beyond that, photography became my first outlet for expression. Coming from the US with all the violence I experienced, racism, police brutality, and having my cousin unarmed and murdered by the police in 2005…photography gave me a chance to show how I see the world. It became my way of not only expressing my humanity, but establishing it. I have never had a moment in photography where I asked myself “why am I doing this?”
