• 
• 
• 

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Chase Jarvis: Master Of The New Media

Chase Jarvis is the consummate photographer, bringing a pure love for the medium and an energy-fueled gusto to the world of commercial photography

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Chase Jarvis is the constant photographer, always shooting in order to perfect his work and share ideas with his fan base via the Internet. He credits an amazing production team for helping to keep him organized with such a huge workload. “I create unreal amounts of data,” he says. “I have 30-some-odd terabytes of drives, and they’re all full. We’re about to get 30 more, and it’s not even slowing down. I’m not kidding. We have more data needs than some Fortune 500 companies.”

A friend once said that you can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want. Chase Jarvis is using the power of the digital age to prove him wrong. He has mastered what it takes to be a digital photographer, from an aggressive online presence to plain old technical know-how in realizing a project’s concept from beginning to end. What’s more, he has become a major commercial photographer while staying true to his roots as an independent artist, and he’s accomplished all of this with a considerable lack of hubris.

Jarvis is also the quintessential run-and-gunner. At first, thanks to an avid interest in extreme sports, he was a 100 percent location shooter, which forged him into a noteworthy technical talent both in and out of the studio. He’s based out of Seattle, with a satellite studio space in Paris, but he’s comfortable shooting anywhere in the world. His commercial campaigns have taken him to the deserts of Dubai, the mountains of Austria and the beautiful beaches of Hawaii. Keeping things exciting and different is what makes him happiest, and it’s a zest for life that shows in his portfolio, his own attitude and his amazing success.

As with all things Jarvis, he took a very roundabout route into photography. He attended college on a soccer scholarship, and though he was majoring in philosophy and premed, it was the passing on of his grandfather that became a life-changing event for him. Jarvis found himself the beneficiary of his grandfather’s camera, and he took it and three accompanying lenses on a postgrad tour of Europe with his then-girlfriend Kate, who’s now his executive producer and his wife. They spent a great deal of time there, living out of bags and traveling from country to country, all the way from Portugal to Sweden to Moscow. Along the way, he taught himself to shoot, and once he returned from Europe, he immediately bailed out on postgrad med school. He had planned to be a doctor, but instead ended up living in Colorado for three years where he started taking pictures of his friends out on the slopes. These friends, as it turned out, were to be the future athletic stars of the extreme-sports lifestyle.