Chase Jarvis’s Seattle 100: A Portrait of the City

Chase Jarvis admits he has a chip on his shoulder. That chip isn’t because success has proved elusive. On the contrary, the Seattle-based photographer travels 150,000 miles per year for work, frequenting New York, Tokyo and beyond to direct photo shoots for clients like Nikon, Reebok and Apple. He’s won awards for his photography and developed quite a following for his  book The Best Camera Is the One You Have With You, a compilation of snapshots taken on his iPhone. The chip, rather, comes from the widely held assumption that commercial and fine art do not, and should not, mix.

“Artists have always had benefactors,” Jarvis says. “The idea that an artist must struggle is still true – but isn’t it maybe an equally relevant struggle to have a job? It’s definitely harder than sipping coffee in your beret.” 

Jarvis’s blue-collar ethic – “I get shit done” – commercial success and creative eye give him a unique vantage point that more homogeneous artist operations don’t have; because of his work, he meets and works with developers, designers, DJs and chefs regularly – and he takes full advantage of the variety. 

Jarvis’s new book Seattle 100: Portrait of a City, which Jarvis will unveil at Heineken City Arts Fest, is the culmination of more than two years of work. A 240-page archive of black-and-white portraits, it captures more than one hundred influential creative leaders working in Seattle right now.

The list includes James Keblas, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Film and Music; Greg Smith, a developer; Jeremy Faver, who picks mushrooms for all the fancy restaurants in town; Greg Lundgren, an artist working in the death-care industry; and Kerry Casey, the goalkeeper for the Sounders.

In an uncharacteristic move, Jarvis shot all the portraits on the same seamless white background in his studio. Makeup artists were available, but he encouraged subjects to come as they are. “It’s a reductive approach that makes it less about who is a millionaire and who’s a ‘hundred-aire.’ It puts the curator of one of the city’s larger museums on the same playing field as someone who is bringing wind power to
Stevens Pass.”

On some of the shoots he spent ten hours attempting to get that one shot, trying to capture the raw personality of his subjects and what he calls “the un-moments,” like when he caught artist Greg Lundgren sipping from a glass. The light didn’t fire properly, yet the resulting photo is beautiful. Jarvis says the book is littered with happy accidents like this.

It’s worth mentioning that he repeatedly describes himself as looking down at this project while “hovering from thirty thousand feet in the air.” Just another sign that all those business trips taught him how to see the bigger possibilities of his creative work. •