How are you doing today, Jason?

Doing good! I woke up earlier than I'm used to so I'm a little tired, but outside of that, I'm thrilled to be alive. 

Tell me why you're here right now.

Oh, we're prepping for a completely vain hour and a half talk that we're doing tomorrow night, which was neither of our ideas, I don't think… we're just doing a little bit of a tech scout before we do an APA event tomorrow, where we're both a little nervous about rambling too much. 

Go into that a little bit more. You're a photographer, I'm a photographer, how'd you get into photography? Tell me about your photographic journey.

I wanted to make movies, initially… My parents got divorced when I was like seven and we were pretty broke, both of my parents were. And my mom, God bless her, you know, she is a single mother raising two kids, she worked over-nights for the post office, and didn't have a lot of money for babysitters, so we were kind of latchkey kids. And her cheap alternative to a babysitter was buying a library of VHS tapes and recording — when we had the free HBO weekends, she would record every fucking movie possible, and they would all have the little HBO subscription advertisements in between. So I grew up just watching Back to the Future, Star Wars, Labyrinth, and you know, a lot of the Spielberg movies: ET, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, and stuff like that. I would just watch those movies to death and I was always enamored with the special effects, camera movements, and actors, so I really, you know, was taken by these stories.

Flash forward a decade. I wanted to go to film school and, you know, my mom didn't give a shit, but she wasn't paying for anything. And my dad and my stepmom, who were going to try to help me get through college, said, we're not going to pay for film school because you're gonna live in the back of a car under an underpass in LA, cause that's not a real job. 

Was there a specific movie or a director that really motivated you to try to get into filmmaking?

Star Wars was huge for me when I was a kid, and I think the one thing that happened (and this would have been probably in about late 1999, early 2000) was that we got a DVD player. I think the first movie we got for it was the Matrix and the DVD had a ton of behind-the-scenes. And I was like, “Oh! It's just like a bunch of fucking scrody dudes making this, you know, crazy shit and coming up with all this new technology to do all these special effects. I could be one of those scrody dudes.”

So, yeah, I was going to school for my gen eds. I had planned to go to Columbia for advertising. I guess they had some kind of advertising program 20 years ago, and my dad was like, we'll pay for that. He had a buddy who had a small, maybe six person advertising/marketing company, and this guy was loaded, so he was like, oh, if you did that, you'll be successful.

I started shooting weddings when I was like 16. I worked at Helix camera for a while.

But you end up going to Columbia, though?

No! I dropped out. I went to College of DuPage, because I grew up in Lombard, and I was two quarters shy of an associate's degree when I got a job with a guy named Will Crockett, who used to do educational photo DVDs that they would mostly sell at Calumet. So I worked for him for a year and that was kind of like my photo school. He had this really fucking hair-brained idea, which is where we filmed a lot of the DVDs and stuff you could buy, and the whole business idea was that it was a school for pro photographers who were transferring from film to digital. So it was like a digital workflow boot camp, and it was a cool idea! They had fashion classes; they had portrait classes; they had product classes. I think each class was four days. But why it was hair-brained is I don’t think he realized the period in which photographers were going to be transferring from film to digital was going to be like a 2-year period. 

So a fellow college dropout.

Yeah… really always wanted to make movies and making still photos was just so much easier to do alone. You didn't need a DP or a producer or actors. Like you, early on, my first gig was with the Red Eye shooting nightlife photography. I did that for about a year. I couldn't hack it because I was around too many drunks who were assholes. They were sending me to the wrong places. You picked the right, cool, places to go to. 

I went to some shitty places too.

Yeah, I dealt with a lot of drunk duck-faced gals… but I think the other thing too is I wouldn't really drink much when I would work, and I'm still to this day very much annoyed by drunk people when I'm not a drunk person. That's how I ended up doing food. I did a year of nightlife bar stuff for Red Eye, and then I think I told them, I don't really want to do this anymore, cause I don't like starting at 1 am and working until 3 am or whatever … and they were like, (honest, I'm not fucking joking, man) They were like, “Our guy who shoots a lot of our restaurants, Clayton, he's working a lot more with Time Out now and he just doesn't seem to have a lot of time for us, so would you want to shoot restaurants?” (Laughs) And I was like, yeah! So I guess our paths have been somewhat intertwined for some time. I had no interest in food or food photography, so that's really where that all started. 

That's interesting. We have a lot of similarities in our career trajectories!

I’m pretty sure I could go back and find an email from Chase Agnello-Dean [former Red Eye editor] saying like, “Oh, yeah, Clayton, he's too cool for us now. So do you want his old job?”

All right. Let's move on from photography. Tell me a little bit about Jason, photography excluded.

Oh boy. I don't know if there really is anybody outside of the photography. 

Do you mean that seriously or joking?

Sometimes I just I don't know who I am, Clayton. (Joking)

I was a musician for six, seven years, played tons of shows in every venue in Chicago, you can imagine. We toured a little bit. I was basically the glorified band manager, which I didn't know, I was getting a little bit of training on kind of how to run a business. I was the least talented musician in the band [called The Glide], so I was doing all the flyer design. I was going out promoting the shows. I was burning CDs. We would go stand outside of The Faint playing at the Metro and hand out CDs because we thought we sounded like The Faint, you know. And then we would go play Cobra Lounge two weeks later.

So, you know, musician for a while, which felt like training for being a freelance artist. 

Where do you like going to see music in Chicago?

Empty Bottle. That always feels like home. I mean, I feel like that was probably one of the first venues I went to when I moved to Chicago and it's still one that I go to, you know, monthly. Thalia Hall is great. A friend took me to a place called Smoke and Mirrors, which is just like a DJ dungeon where everybody's on molly, and I had a fucking blast, man! I had a fun time just listening to like 24-year old DJs from Australia. Smartbar is always a great time. I wish the Double Door was still here. Loved the Double Door. 

What about Chicago food round: favorite spot to eat?

Man, a lot of them are gone. I loved Blackbird. I loved the Bristol. Those are those are both gone. I don't repeat restaurants a lot. And I haven't been dating for about a year, and I feel like dating or being in a relationship is something that brings you to restaurants. You realize when you're single, you don't go out to eat fucking ever for any reason.

I’m a real Midwestern dude, like Portillo’s! More bizarrely than anything is I usually get a cheeseburger with a medium french fry, and like that's it, that's the whole deal, right there.

You would think for someone who's been doing food photography and did restaurant coverage for a while, I'd have real strong opinions on food in the city. I really don't. 

Leaving Chicago, favorite place you've ever been, and or a dream destination?

I mean, I think one of the favorite big cities that I have been to is Berlin, but I think it was because at the time I was very into big city party scenes and 24-hour techno clubs and shit, which I don't know if I could survive anymore. That was about a decade ago. Berlin was cool because everybody's very educated and very like elevated in thinking, very philosophical. I remember this guy that I met in Hamburg, who is probably one of the funniest and just the most deadpan people I've ever met, he was like, “Do you want to hear a cool joke in German?“ And I was like, “Yeah!” And he's like, “Too bad there aren’t none.” That's working on multiple levels, guy, way to go.

You know, if I could see moving somewhere, it would probably be like Spain or Portugal or something like that. I went to Colombia for a couple weeks, about two or three years ago. That was great, too, but definitely some disparity between the rich and the poor there, so I don't know it's somewhere you wanna live. 

Final question. I like to ask about Ai, and I know you use it in your work. Is it gonna be a net positive or a net negative for society? Five, ten years from now.

Well, I think it depends on your definition of net positive for society. You know, I just wanna say this on the record that I love Ai, and that when they may or may not take over, I will be a completely obedient pet. Just as long as I have a living room to run around in and a warm corner to sleep in, I will be a happy camper. And I've always been a champion of Ai. Take a look at my work, take a look at my website, take a look at everything I've posted on Instagram. 

Anything else you want to leave us with?

Wherever you go, there you are. 

Thank you.

Thank you, Clayton. I appreciate it.