Chris and Larry: What’s different about your approach?

Chase Jarvis: It’s really a great asset to be willing to fail and blow it, so to speak, and to be okay with just making stuff, sharing it and getting feedback. I coupled that with new socialization tools to get my work out there in the world and get a lot of feedback.

Chris and Larry: Your use of social networking technology is pretty impressive.

Chase Jarvis: I’m a hard working culture junkie who knows that it’s the greatest time in history to be a photographer or creative.

It’s the first time in the history of the world that creatives are also distributors. And that’s very profound if you think that up until the recent history, permission was required for us to be able to share work at any sort of scale. We had to get permission from galleries, from ad agencies or photo editors to be able to have our work out there. And now anybody with access to a computer can show their work in 200 countries around the world. So my adoption of new technology is about the socialization of my work, creating and sharing work in ways that just were not available in the past.

To be creative, you have to make stuff. If you sit around waiting for the perfect idea, you’re never going to get anywhere. And it just so happens that some good ideas occasionally float to the top.

Chris and Larry: And those are the ones hopefully people will remember.

Chase Jarvis: Yeah, exactly. And the idea is if you put something out that sucks, it fades away pretty quickly. And if you put out a concept like the Best Camera or the first iPhone book that we did, those have some sticking power and they will be around for a while.

Chris and Larry: At first it seems strange that a pro that shoots with world class photographic equipment would publish a book of their iPhone pictures. But you also came up with a wildly successful iPhone app that made tweaking and sharing photos easy and a created an entire community around it. How did the project grow to that scale? Was it initially planned that way?

Chase Jarvis: My goal is never to make a project large scale. My goal always stems from solving a creative problem or creative challenge.

At the most fundamental level of the whole iPhone movement was my desire to have a visual journal. When the iPhone first came out I started taking pictures with it every day. As someone who travels the world shooting major ad campaigns with all the best equipment in the world, this little camera that at first had only 2 megapixels suddenly gave me more creative freedom than I felt like I had in my professional life. And that was incredibly interesting and empowering for me.

Suddenly gone was all the pressure to make the perfect picture. I was more interested in the immediate and the now and the things that were near me, and using that as kind of a study or sounding board for my other work. Well, even that idea that this was just a sounding board for my other work was quickly supplanted with, wait a minute, this is actually work in and of itself. It’s conceptual artwork and it’s informing, not just my professional work, but my life. And the freedom it gave me was incredible.

All I wanted to do was then share that idea because it was rewarding for me. So I started socializing my pictures and sharing them online every day through different outlets like Facebook and Twitter. The feedback that I got, not just from the pictures, but from the concept, was really staggering. I think the first iPhone gallery that I put on my site received two million views in something like 72 hours. The concept is simple. The pictures aren’t about megapixels or dynamic range, and all those things that technical photographers talk about. They’re really about stories and the moment, which I learned by first desiring a visual journal and seeing the kind of feedback it got. When I started using the camera, I realized that there were no apps out there that did exactly what I wanted to do. So I made my own.

So there’s kind of this necessity is the mother of invention behind these larger concepts. And then the community for that, in that case, TheBestCamera.com was just a logical extension to this thing that has changed my creative life. I feel more creative now than ever before. I want to share that with people to inspire them and say, hey, if I can do it, you can do it. I want to give them a tool, like the iPhone app, and then give them a place to put their creations at thebestcamera.com along with all their other social channels. So it never starts out as a grand vision, I just went with it and it all came together for me.

Chris and Larry: Like a snowball turning into an avalanche.

Chase Jarvis: That’s exactly what it was. In reality, it’s been going on since I started taking pictures with my phone camera. I did wake up at one point in the middle of the night and say, wait a minute, I got this book coming out in a few months and we’ve been working on this iPhone app. There seemed to be a really cool tie-together. But it evolved very organically and very naturally. It’s really been just kind of setting them free at the same time that I feel like leads people to believe that it was all conceived in one great creative session.

Chris and Larry: Would you say the feedback you get from social media is an important part of your creative process?

Chase Jarvis: I think your characterization is accurate. For me, an important part of this whole process is the immediacy of it. Like creating and the sharing. I think those kind of combined acts are fundamental to my personal creative process. But I think none of these things are necessarily conscious for me. It’s like when someone asks you “what’s your style”, and you didn’t realize you had a style until you’ve done it for a long time. I’m able to look back and say that the mechanism of creating and sharing is contingent on the right now part of it, because the thing that I do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, is part of that process.

Chris and Larry: How does that work on a practical basis?

Chase Jarvis: It starts with making a lot of stuff. Finding the best ideas only happens after you have a million ideas and have a cross section of things to choose from. And I think that’s important to people understanding my process and maybe being able to make it applicable to themselves. Chuck Close once said “Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.” If you only develop your best ideas, how many ideas would you develop? Sometimes the ideas that don’t start out to be your best ideas evolve, like the Best Camera, and cell phone photography evolves into something that I’m talking to museums about. The irony is that there wasn’t an immediate understanding of what it was going to be - it was just creative sharing.

Chris and Larry: How did you get so good at it?

Chase Jarvis: I think it’s in the same way that you build up your ability to run fast or to make your muscles stronger. You lift weights. The more weights you lift, the stronger you get. In the case of my creative process, I’ve built up a callous, though that’s the wrong word, but you just get used to it. And it didn’t start out that way by any stretch of the imagination.

The first time a friend said, “Hey, you should start a blog,” I just thought it sounded very self-centered. But he said, “No, no, don’t just point it at your own stuff; point it at other people’s stuff.” So the next week I pointed it at some other people’s photos. And then he said, “Why don’t you do a video?” And I thought, oh man, this is a lot of work. But as soon as you start doing those things, you start feeling the benefit, both personally and structurally. You start to see some social interaction in the world. Maybe you create a conversation, and it’s a motivator in and of itself taking on a life of its own. And you get better at it and that all goes back to being willing to throw it out there and fail, and throw it out there and get feedback of all types. And you do get better at it.

Chris and Larry: What I’m hearing you say is something that I’ve heard artists speak of many times. But people who are in the high pressure world of commercial photography rarely think in terms of “it’s okay to fail”. If you want to keep a big client you have to produce. How do you reconcile those two worlds, the art world where it’s OK to experiment and see what happens, and then the big-time world of the big corporations who see you as someone who will produce the work they need? Do you feel that you have to switch gears, or do you just handle it all with the same attitude?

Chase Jarvis: I think that is one of the best questions I’ve been asked in an interview in a long time. I haven’t ever articulated this to myself, but as you were asking the question, I started thinking.

I think that part of why I get hired and what people might like is that once I’ve got the thing that the art director wanted in the can, now let’s turn this idea on its head. I’m not being a renegade for the sake of being renegade. I got the shot that we talked about prior to getting here. But it’s about how can you bring the fearlessness and an experimental approach to the commercial setting? Because it’s very rarely the shot that you think is going to be the shot that ends up in the campaign. It’s usually one of these that are more adventurous, ones that are created in the moment, rather than the ones that were drafted by the creative director back at the agency.

Chris and Larry: So getting that one in the can is the first priority, and once you feel that you’ve covered your bases, and then you continue to play and to experiment.

Chase Jarvis: Absolutely. And those are the ones that tend to be the most successful pictures. And the weird part is that the reason you end up getting hired is not because you’re able to be like a monkey and take the pictures the art director drew, but it’s because when you’re on set, you’re able to create something that was unanticipated and exceeded the original vision of the client.

And it’s hard to do. You’ve got to kind of develop the balls to pull that off. I don’t want to sound like I’ve got this figured out because it has been a huge trial and error process. You need to be dependable and be all those things, but you’ve also got to take the risk. You’ve got to swing for the fence. Michael Jordan has 33 game-winning shots to his credit, but he’s also probably missed hundreds because he’s not afraid to fail. If you don’t swing, you don’t hit the ball. At the end of the day, you build up a tolerance for the fear of risk associated around creating, and ultimately, that is sort of a constant that you take into the next job.

Chris and Larry: Let’s talk about your personal work. You did a project called Songs for Eating and Drinking. How did that come together?

Chase Jarvis: The project was kind of born full-grown. And at its core, the concept is a simple one, get a bunch of insanely talented musicians together, and let them share songs, food, and drink. A friend of mine, Michael Hebb, is kind of a food provocateur, and his favorite thing in the world is putting amazing people together and cooking an amazing meal. We got together and wanted to collaborate.

We found that the power is in everyone winning, everyone benefiting, and what a richer place the world is. I personally stay interested because it’s invoking things that I’m genuinely passionate about. I love music, I love food, I love creating and sharing.

Some of the artists that are at the table are very famous and they’re used to playing in front of audiences of thousands of people. What they really want is to get back to their roots. And so the evening gives them an opportunity to do just that.

When Pearl Jam fans get an opportunity to see Stone Gossard playing a guitar with a rapper rapping over the top of him, totally impromptu in the middle of a dinner, the fans love that.

So it’s some sort of combination of these interdisciplinary ideas that I feel like I get the most value from. Not that I don’t love just taking a picture or shooting a campaign or directing a commercial, but I’m really excited when I’m doing what I love and the person across the table from me is doing what they love.

Chris and Larry: There can be real synergy bringing talented people together in these great venues - but how do you get paid? Your success infers that there’s a new business model that’s kicking in. Where does the revenue come from?

Chase Jarvis: It’s the new model that lets creative people have their own distribution channel, allowing us to share our personal work.

So let’s say I finish a job and instead of buying a new couch or a new car with the money, I put that into a personal project. I’m going to be able to create a cool body of work that is going to make me feel alive and bring the most out of me creatively. And that work will be responsible for me getting my next job, maybe getting a cooler job, and having my personal brand equity and my personal value as a creative be higher than the last job that I did.

You wouldn’t believe the phone calls, and they’re not just a repeat of the last job. And for the next ad, it’s like, “Well, I saw what you did with Songs for Eating and Drinking and I loved the style.” If I hadn’t done that project then I wouldn’t have gotten that call to shoot this ad campaign and shoot it in a way that I wanted to shoot it. I would have been asked to do it in the way that the art director did it, the way that they’d all seen it done before. So it’s a great way to develop a personal style and a great way to then get hired for that style.

I would advocate that throwing money at personal projects is in many ways a stepping stone or a ladder to growth and evolution and ultimately jobs. Those personal projects translate specifically into jobs for me.

Chris and Larry: That brings us to your new book, “Seattle 100, The Portrait of a City.” Can you tell us about how that came together? It appears that it started as a personal project, and now you’ve got a book and a website.

Jason Puccinelli

Chase Jarvis: It started out of realizing that I love Seattle. I’ve had a home here almost my entire life, but at some point I realized that I didn’t know my city as well as I wanted to. I’m on the road a lot, most of the work that I do professionally is not in Seattle. It’s all in major advertising markets like New York, Los Angeles or London.

And so I started making a list of the people I found to be remarkable in Seattle because I wanted to collaborate. Once I made a list of people that were doing amazing things, I realized my project could be the list itself. The first list was people that I knew, that would let me take their picture and share their story with the world. And then I made another list of people that I thought would be fascinating to meet that were in and around Seattle. An important distinction here, these are not people like Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz, who are normally seen as heroes in Seattle.

Over the course of the three years that it took me to complete the project, I started to develop a vision for having a website that painted a cultural ethnography around the photography that I had done.

Laura "Piece" Kelley-Jahn

I had an idea, I started doing it, and the idea evolved. It turned into a three-year long project documenting underground cultural leaders and the places that they love in Seattle. That’s why I called it Portrait of a City because it gives you a picture of the city, but through the eyes of 100 people that I found interesting.

And the hope of the project was that it was going to allow cross-pollination and encourage the city to take a look at itself. I was hoping to break down barriers, you know architects hang around with the architects, and the break dancers hang out with the break dancers.

Chris and Larry: People are used to coffee table books being $50 or more. But if you go to Amazon and buy this with a discount, it costs about $26. Is that part of the concept too, to make it more accessible?

Chase Jarvis: Absolutely. The democratization of creativity is a theme in the stuff that I’m trying to share with the world. And for people who couldn’t afford the $26, we’ve built a beautiful web site so they could in some way experience the project.

The first price that was suggested was just under $70. We were able to change that and to make it list for under $40. And on Amazon, with discounts it’s about $26. I think that at the core, that’s the right idea, the right vibe.

The Blakes

Chris and Larry: It seems everyone else monetizes sequel after sequel, but that you’re always on to another project. Do you ever go back and rework an idea?

Chase Jarvis: Oh my gosh. That’s a great question too. I could name so many things that I’ve done wrong. People point out how a project can be a huge business model in and of itself, and I think sure, maybe in my next life, or perhaps when I’m “more mature” I’ll be able to think more like that.

I definitely created the Seattle 100 with the idea of doing a series of these. It was an idea and a platform, if you will. And that’s in many ways, what the Best Camera was as well. I have visions of future books, a whole series of books that are from all over the world. But you touched on an important point. It would definitely help some things if we slowed down a little bit, but I’ve got to confess, I have a hard time with that. I’m always excited about the next thing.