The beauty of photography is how personal it is to every photographer. So says Suva based photographer and filmmaker Jason Chute.
Reflecting on photographs he printed out for his photography exhibition, titled #realpacific, at the Gallery of Oceanian Art at the University of the South Pacific’s Oceania Centre, Laucala Campus in Suva, Mr Chute said photography was a serendipitous affair.
“You’re just lucky,” he said. “You just have to be prepared to see it and click at the right time.
“Sometimes you can walk around for days, and you don’t find anything and then some days it just happens.”
Jason is a fourth generation Fijian of mixed decent, who has been wandering the Pacific while on assignments, and capturing the essence of Pacific life as it appears before him through the lens. As a child he was always artistically inclined.
He would draw anything before him and began taking pictures of anything in front of him when he discovered the camera. He also dabbled in tattooing.
“When I was young I used to draw a lot and I was really good with the art and things like that so it shaped how I see the world and photographs.
“I don’t look for a photograph and take it to adhere to photographic conventions, it’s all in these but its not something that defines a photograph for me.
“All the time it’s just like you’re walking around, and you see it and bang! “You take the shot.” Being who he is, whenever he identifies a photograph, he feels a physical reaction to it and gets compelled to take the picture.
“I have to take a picture otherwise I get agitated.”
He said everything from the title of his exhibition to the photos were not definitive.
“Photography is not one thing, the collection is not definitive of anything.
“If another person comes around and takes another set that will be his, it’s personal and that’s the beauty about it.
“The title is social media hashtag that I have been using for the past 10 to 15 years, I don’t own it.”
While some photographers ramble on about photographic conventions and taking their pictures with reference to those conventions, for Mr Chute a photograph is simply ‘capturing something you see in front of you’.
“I can’t stand that ‘he took the greatest photograph and blah blah blah’.”
Being a person of mixed race, with a unique family heritage, has really made him aware of the similarities and differences Pacific people have as members of a society and this is reflected in the selection of photographs on display.
“Being mixed means you’re neither here nor there, but both here and there at the same time.
“You’re not fully there or here, you’ve got some of this blood and that blood and it kind of changes the way you see things. “A lot of people see what separates us, we are all different but we’re all kind of the same too.
“It doesn’t matter what race you are, you hear all these politicians and people saying a certain group is not Pacific Islanders, or that ethnicity is not Pacific Islanders.
“When you live in the Pacific, the realities of living in the Pacific are universal for all the people living here.
“We all have our unique culture, we all have our unique ethnicity but we’re are all part of the collective, this is the real Pacific.
“I just wanted to celebrate the richness of the Pacific.”
A piece that stands out in the collection is the photograph of a chair before a shelf of files in a government office in Tonga, which depicts a colonial system working in the 21st century.
“I was sitting outside and I just kind of pondered, and it struck me as a photograph, symbolic of how the Pacific was, or still is.
“Those files are all well-organized but it’s still paper. “It kind of harkens back to the old colonial way of doing things, it was organized but it was analog, it was old.”
Having had the privilege to travel his own back yard, making his bread and butter, he says he feels just like a gentleman cruising around with his camera, compiling a travel log of photographs he made about what the Pacific means to him.
“It’s my real Pacific, its real because it was there in front of me.
“That’s the most basic definition of real. “I saw it, thing happened and click! “There it was.”
