Kid from India:
I was born in a small town in central India, deep in the heartland. As a young teenager I became friends with a boy at school whose family had migrated from Iran.
One day I got an excited call from my friend, “Jasper, wanna buy a camera?” Turned out his uncle from the old country was visiting. This elderly Persian man had been sightseeing around India but was now running low on funds, and wanted to sell his camera. I happily obliged. That’s how I was introduced to my life long love of photography.
First Camera:
The camera in question was a Russian model, called Lubitel 2, a cheap knockoff of the much better constructed German TLR (Twin Lens Reflex) model, Rolleiflex. Instruction manual was missing, and the uncle mostly spoke Farsi, a language I was not very conversant with. So figuring out how to use that camera involved a significant amount of self learning. Surprising how much we can teach ourselves if we are passionate enough about something.
My dad on his farm. I took this portrait of him when I was thirteen.
New Life in the US:
I was nineteen when I decided to fly halfway around the world from India to San Francisco, California, to start a new life. First job was washing dishes in a diner in Berkeley, and I couldn’t be more excited.
It was late 1970s and a thrilling time to be in San Francisco. Flower children passing around joints in Haight Ashbury; bright eyed idealists protesting in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, Journey performing at the Day On The Green alongside Black Sabbath, and a naive kid from India soaking it all in.
I had brought my cheap Russian camera with me from India. During breaks from dishwashing, I would walk around the neighborhood taking photos. The waitresses at the diner noticed, and soon I was walking over to their apartments after work and taking photos of them.
One of the waitresses was a dancer and invited me to her dance studio. Turned out I had a knack for capturing dance. You see, when a dancer leaps into the air, there is a tiny fraction of a second when they hit the peak and the form is perfect. Half a second too early, or half a second too late, and the photo is just not as good.
Nowadays with digital cameras we can immediately check to see if we got it. But back then, in the days of film, photographers had no idea what they had captured until they received the processed film back the next day.
For some reason I had a preternatural ability to click the shutter just at the right time every time. Dancers were ecstatic to find someone who could capture them perfectly. I found myself shooting with a lot of dancers!
Life as Professional Photographer
In time I graduated from washing dishes to becoming a professional photographer. For the past four decades I have had a heck of a good time traveling the world and doing photography. My photography has appeared on the covers of magazines around the world (US, UK, Russia, Germany, Netherlands, and Australia).
I have had fun creating 100s of full page ads for clothing companies, oversize graphics for trade shows, massive instore fashion photos, and countless catalogs. I have photographed a wide array of assignments: high end audio speakers for Harmon Kardon, motion picture cameras for Panavision, jewelry for Energy Muse, CD covers for musicians, posters for B-movies, and many more that I admit, I have trouble remembering.
Jasper Johal’s photography has been published in magazines around the world
After all these years, I am just as excited about creating beautiful photographs as I was that day when as a 13 years old, I bicycling home after purchasing his first camera.
