We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jason Bruner. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jason below.

Jason , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My wife, Keeley, and I collaborated on a short photo book in 2021 for a project we called “Body of the Earth”. I had made photographs of water, clouds, and rocks, and I was struck by how skin-like their textures looked on black and white film. The images of skin that we included in the book were all of Keeley, and I made them in one session in late 2021. We had encountered a crucially difficult period for us, and for a short time it wasn’t clear to me what our future looked like as partners. The photographs of skin were taken when we chose to walk out of that moment together. As I reviewed the images that became the book, I wanted to re-take several of them. But I ultimately chose only from the couple dozen images we made in that session. Vera Benschop (of Benschop Books — please check her work out!) did an elegant layout that included multiple fold-out panels that allow the viewer to make new combinations of textures from the images. I think it’s a beautiful project on its own, but its significance for us has always been that it preserves the groundedness we’ve found in one another, especially after a time of disorientation.

Jason , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve worked as a professor of religious studies for the past 11 years, with 8 years of graduate school training in before that. While I was deeply dedicated to my art classes in high school, I mostly set them aside during college and completely ignored them through graduate school. When I got a job as a professor, I quickly discovered that the academic publishing that I had so enjoyed in graduate school suddenly felt stale, though now my livelihood depending on publishing my research. I turned to creative writing to try and find a way to reinvigorate my prose, and I became very interested in creative nonfiction, essays, and memoir. From there, I was influenced by writers like Teju Cole, Randy R. Potts, and Jeff Sharlet, who were making good use of the combinations of text and images. This moved me to learn about photography, and I was quickly drawn to analog photography because I felt like it would make me attend to fundamentals of photographic practice. I practiced on early morning walks through our neighborhood, often with a baby in a carrier on my chest. Around that same time, our oldest daughter would often wake early and ask me to draw pictures for her to color. This grew into drawing small sets of paper dolls and their accessories most mornings, and her persistence re-introduced me to drawing. Artistic practices have always rested at this intersection of curiosity, family, and daily life. It’s such a generative place, and I am attracted to working in this way because it allows me to learn rather than be an “expert,” which is the main way that academic knowledge is understood. In this way, I came to take up woodworking after I renovated our kitchen (with a lot of help from YouTube’s “how to” section).

I enjoy making a very wide range of work, and I’ve been honored and flattered by those who have bought it or asked me to make something unique for them. I’ve drawn several portraits, typically using graphite, charcoal, pen, and cut paper. I’ve also made wooden knives, spoons, cutting boards, and bowls, along with lamps and lampshades (a current project). One particularly fun project was illustrating a pair of shoes with animals and plants from the Sonoran Desert, where I live. And perhaps my favorite request came from my mother-in-law, who asked me to design an arts & crafts-era newell post, along with custom marquetry panels that would decorate the top of the post. In these ways, I love finding the medium appropriate to the work, rather than fitting ideas into a single method of production.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

It’s been about the combination of curiosity and a desire to keep learning. I also remain deeply competitive with myself — a characteristic I try not to impose on others. I don’t like doing things partially, and I don’t want to simply learn something, but to learn to do it well. Those inclinations have brought new methods and media into my work, and any new method or media then impacts the others. Photographing the ordinariness of my neighborhood made me pay attention to the subtle differences in how spaces look and feel. That kind of attention started to become reflected in my writing, which made me think about drawing differently. I love the circularity of it.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I primarily work as an academic, and academia does weird things to one’s thinking and identity. You’re trained in a field or discipline and work to master the scholarship that’s been done in order to try to make an original contribution, typically to a tiny area or topic within a broad field of study. I don’t have any issues with that, per se, but the effect of that on the people who take this kind of work on can warp our sense of self. While we are being trained in a discipline, we’re also being socialized in ways that tend to conflate what we know professionally with who we are personally. Our credentials (degrees, grants, publications, awards) are understood as essential to our standing and credibility, our ability to say anything. For these reasons, I rarely introduce myself as an “artist” or “photographer” and have long felt very much an imposter because I don’t have much formal training outside of history and religious studies. I’m gradually unlearning this, and I’ve worked to find ways to incorporate artistic practices into some of my scholarly work. I don’t have a resolution here. It’s an ongoing tension, though I think one that I can use productively.

Contact Info:

• Other: I’m rather digitally “off-the-grid” by comparison to a lot of folks. Here is a link to my faculty profile, which has some links to creative work that’s been published: https://search.asu.edu/profile/2210229

Image Credits
Note: all images are mine.