When I showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on the campus of San Jose State, one of the first dudes I met was Jay Clendenin, a fellow aspiring photojournalist from Southern California. He had a magnetic personality that made people want to be around him, despite the fact that he was quite a smart-ass. He had an uncanny sense for who among us was the most sensitive , and he always made a point of ruffling that person’s feathers.
I think deep down, people appreciate that kind of brazen honesty, and Jay had that to spare. And after spending more and more time with Jay, you saw that, at his core, he was an excited, talented, ambitious photojournalist—a genuinely great guy that people loved to be around.
Memories of our time together at San Jose State flooded back as I picked up the new issue of PDN magazine and saw Jay’s image on the cover. The issue is focused on studios, and the creative ways to build portrait studios. The article really speaks to how Jay has always and continues to think outside the box. He’s one of my many peers from San Jose State who have taken his background in photojournalism, and applied that light, fast, nimble mentality toward photography and built a decorated career for himself.
After San Jose State, Jay did a handful of internships and eventually got hired as a staff photographer at the Hartford Courant. Living on the East Coast, he started doing more freelance work, and eventually moved to New York, where Time Magazine snatched him up and had him covering presidential campaigns, flying around on Air Force One. He moved to Washington D.C., chasing a woman he’d end up marrying and having a child with, and also becoming a White House photographer, while balancing a career doing editorial work for the biggest magazines out there.
Eventually, he was hired by the L.A. Times to be the newspaper’s lead portrait photographer, working with and shooting celebrities. Basically, at a time when newspapers were struggling to redefine themselves in the digital age, Jay was in such demand and thriving in one of the most sought-after journalism jobs in the nation.
Recently, Jay came up with an innovative idea for going to the Sundance Film Festival, setting up a tiny room and, using different fabrics as backgrounds, shot celebrities over the course of the week. He not only came away with a catalog of some amazing, memorable portraits of some of the most well-known and respected artists of our time, but he got recognized by PDN for his out-of-the-box thinking and landed the magazine’s latest cover story featuring his work.
Great job, Jay. You’re still a smart-ass, but dammit, that’s why we love you.
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