We recently connected with Jacob Lewkow and have shared our conversation below.
Jacob, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?
Absolutely. There’s an old photographer’s saying that applies to life: “You miss every shot you don’t take.” This is so true, even when it doesn’t make sense on paper. As for “vacations” sometimes I can afford them, and other times I need to just get away and then figure out how to pay for it later. It’s so important to switch up the scenery sometimes, recharge your soul and creative juices, and draw inspiration from the unfamiliar. Being a business owner, more often than not it seems like there’s no ideal time to put your work life on pause. It’s all about finding the slower pockets of time. Hopefully, they align with your loved ones and your bank account. Also, you never know what could turn into a project, professional or personal.
At the end of 2019, I went on back-to-back trips to Brazil and Mexico. Both of these travel experiences were so profound and significant that I found myself in tears on each return flight back to Detroit. Although it required a good amount of time and money to embark on two international trips, I will never regret the decision. Little did I know the world would be shut down three months later, and everything would change drastically with COVID-19.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
Since my childhood, I’ve always wanted to have a creative career path, but I didn’t know exactly what that would look like. I’ve always loved music, drawing, and painting, but it wasn’t until high school that I found that we had a fantastic photography program being run by a kind, passionate, and extremely talented professor, Allison Davis. My peers and I were incredibly privileged to be in her program, where she shared her love and knowledge of this magical medium. I found special energy in the darkroom, as did many others. Her encouragement led me to win awards and follow this strange journey that is being a photographer. I was attracted to the program at College for Creative Studies in Detroit, but I was offered a scholarship I couldn’t refuse from Kendall College of Art Design in Grand Rapids. Here is where I spent the next five years making life-long friendships, and learning more about photography from professors like Dennis Grantz, and Thomas Allen. I also fell in love with printmaking, which became my minor. Upon completion of my college career, I moved back to Metro Detroit to my parents’ house where I grew up. My mom hooked me up with Ara Howrani (an Armenian family-friend connection), a prominent and fantastic photographer in Detroit who carried the torch of his legendary father, Ameen’s renowned legacy as Detroit’s “people” photographer when everyone else was shooting cars. The Howrani Studio has such deep history, from the countless photoshoots to the wild parties; you can feel it as soon as you enter the doors. I did a short stint as an intern for Ara for only a few months, and his father passed shortly after. I will always cherish that short period of time.
When the internship with Howrani Studio wasn’t panning out financially, I took a job at a local cafe working as a barista within a high-end market out of necessity to make some money. One day at the cafe, a man collapsed due to cardiac arrest and was losing his life before my eyes. A handful of gawkers stood around, petrified. Taking action without much thought, I performed some amateur version of CPR on him, which somehow miraculously helped keep his blood pumping while EMS was arriving to defibrillate and take him away on a stretcher. Three weeks later, this same man came into the cafe and asked to sit down with me, where I told him the story of what happened, as well as a little about myself. Within two weeks, this man connected me with of the state’s more prominent commercial photographers, Joe Vaughn, who became my mentor for about three years. Working under an established photographer taught me more in 3 years than the five I spent in “academia”. Not only how to shoot, but how to manage a studio and a business, how to interact on a set with fellow crew members, and with clients. I recommend to ANYONE wanting to explore photography as a career: Assist as many people as possible, for as long as possible, until you are very confident that you’re ready to be on your own. These are people that have been doing this for years, adapting to new trends and technology. Rather than spending years of your life paying back student loans, you can get paid to actually learn with hands-on experience. I wish someone would’ve told me this long ago. As an assistant, I traveled overseas, and around the USA on photoshoots of everything from restaurants to resorts, and some oddballs in between.
It’s important for me to give due credit to my parents for the example they’ve set for me, along with being raised in a family business. My mother worked in radio advertising for about thirty years, managing sales teams both regionally and nationally. She’s always had that boss-lady swagger and a healthy hustle. I grew up watching my dad run multiple businesses from his home office since I was very young. Along with a strong entrepreneurial spirit, he’s always had a special charisma that others always tend to appreciate and gravitate to. When we moved to Michigan in 1993, he began his journey as “Cappuccino Man” doing a mobile espresso bar catering service when nobody knew what a cappuccino or cafe latte was in Metro Detroit. He’s always been ahead of his time, and I don’t he realized at the time that this business would grow in unimaginable ways. I worked behind the cart as a barista since I was about twelve years old, and watched the business evolve over time. This taught me a lot about working with people, professionalism, customer service, and human energy. My two siblings, Noah and Sarah, are now partners in the business and running separate ships in both Metro Detroit and the greater Los Angeles areas, continuing the evolution and constant growth of the brand. My parents still play an important role behind the scenes with my mom keeping the books and doing administrative work, and my dad still working his magic with sales, meetings, and showing up to events to tell the “Cap-Man” story. I’m extremely proud of my family for all they’ve done and keep doing to push the business’s potential.
More than twelve years later now, I own a loft in Detroit that I call my home and studio with my husband, Lucas, and two cats, Bruno and Victor. I’m grateful to be working with a wide variety of clients from local to global, and continuing to grow as a freelancer. It feels really good to look back on each step of the way, but I also know there’s still much to be done to grow as a human, a photographer, and a professional.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Making work that I can feel proud of, and live off of, and seeing it perform. Feeling a sense of growth, and working with other talented creatives. Seeing the look on the faces of my clients and feeling their genuine appreciation for the hard work my team and I put into each project comes with great satisfaction. When other people recognize the value we bring to the table as creative professionals, it’s motivation to keep going, and keep growing.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
When you hire a creative professional, you’re paying for a product and a service, as well as the experience required to meet your needs effectively and efficiently. Photography is an expensive career to be in, which requires pricy equipment. Cameras, lenses, software, insurance, and support from a crew of fellow creative professionals. When I ask my clients for a budget on their project, it’s not so I can put as much money in my pocket as possible, but rather create the highest-quality product with the resources we can utilize within that dollar amount. Good, fast, cheap; pick two at the expense of the third. Before I pick up a camera, it’s important for me to understand what a brand or company is about, and how it/they want to be portrayed in a visual language. Sometimes a brand hasn’t been fully developed enough for an artist to understand how to create for them, in which case I do a deeper dive with the client into the mission and ethos of the brand, as well as the aesthetic. This is such an important thing for clients to understand because, without a proper brand style guide, we creatives are “shooting in the dark”, and basically guessing what they want. This helps us better understand how to create and meet the goals of our clients, both short-term and long game. Some of the more significant clients that I’ve proudly partnered with are Campbells, Mattel, Red Bull, Simply Orange, Bacardi, Forbes, and Fortune. I pride myself in my dedication to diversity and inclusion, as the photo industry is straight-white-male-dominated. It’s so important for me to bring people of marginalized and underrepresented communities into the fold, such as females, people of color, and the LGBTQ community.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jacoblewkow.com
- Instagram: @jacoblewkowphoto
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/jacoblewkowphotography
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-lewkow-78636a31/
Image Credits
Jacob Lewkow