Jarod Lew
Photographer
Jarod Lew is a Chinese American photographer originally from Beverly Hills, MI. He started his photography journey after an unexpected phone call from his ex-girlfriend’s grandma. Since then, his work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME, Aperture Magazine and exhibited in museums around the globe.
His work explores Asian-American identity, intergenerational relationships, and memory. When he was in his 20s, he found out his mom was the former fiancée of Vincent Chin (Read: Who was Vincent Chin?). He created In Between You and Your Shadow, portraits of his mom, based off that experience.
Currently, he has his first solo show, Strange You Never Knew, on display at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art until June 2025. Exhibits include Please Take Off Your Shoes (portraits of second-gen Asian Americans inside their parents homes) and Mimicry (superimposed photos of his face onto vintage white family photos from the 1950s).
This interview was edited for length & clarity. It took place on March 12th, 2025.
Q: Tell me about your journey to becoming a photographer.
JL: I fell into photography not knowing I’d be so passionate about it. I always knew I wanted to be some sort of creative. For undergrad, I studied graphic design at Michigan State University because I wanted to be creative while still having a steady paycheck from an agency. But then I graduated during the 2008 recession and couldn’t find a job.
At the time, the girlfriend I was dating had grandparents who owned a photography studio in St. Clair Shores. One day, her grandmother (a very conservative, strict, traditional white woman) called me out of the blue. She said: “Jarod, I had a dream that you work at our photo studio. How would you like a job?” I was like, “Absolutely.”
After 2-3 weeks of working there, my girlfriend broke up with me. But I continued working at the studio. That was where I fell in love with photography.
The studio, Stewart Fine Portraits, was a high school portrait studio so it wasn’t glamorous — I was photographing a lot of high school sports teams and yearbook photos. But what made it special was that the owners showed me the business aspect of photography and how to have a fine art career outside of a 9-5. I loved that I didn’t have to be in an office but could be out in the world interacting with people while hiding behind my camera.
I just kept making personal projects for myself outside of the studio. I was constantly Googling photographers to teach myself how to be a better photographer. That’s how I transitioned from high school portrait school photographer to making work that dealt with my own interiority and experience.
Eventually, I got laid off from the photo studio. I worked a lot of retouch jobs so I was within photography but not the actual photographer.
I always wanted to keep photography away from any source of money-making so I could keep my passion for the medium alive — to always have that burning sensation of making. I’ve heard too many stories of friends who wanted to make personal projects, but because they needed money, they started photographing weddings and got so burned out that they stopped doing anything creative.
Doing retouching, I was stuck at my computer a lot and could feel my body kind of caving in. When the pandemic hit, I had a lot of time to reflect. I realized I didn’t want to retouch for the rest of my life. I decided to apply to Yale’s MFA in photography because I wanted photography in my life but not as my main income, I thought teaching photography would be another way to make a living.
Then in 2021, I got shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize for my Please Take Off Your Shoes collection. (For context, Aperture is a very well-known photography foundation. If you’re shortlisted or win the portfolio prize, you gain a lot of recognition).
That really blew up my career, and my life completely changed. Afterward, San Francisco MOMA reached out to me do to an exhibition. The Aperture Prize gave me the confidence to apply to Yale, and I got in. The year before I went to Yale, Aperture commissioned me to do another project, In Between You and Your Shadow. At Yale, I got to interact with the photography heroes I was Googling — people like Gregory Crewdson, who’s the director of photography at Yale. It’s been such a whirlwind, it’s all been so unexpected.
"But I always wanted to keep photography away from any source of money-making so I could keep my passion for the medium alive. To always have that burning sensation of making."
In Between You and Your Shadow, Jarod Lew, UMMA 2025
Q: How has photography changed the way you see and engage with the world?
JL: I think I must have some sort of undiagnosed ADHD because when I’m out in the world, I’m always overstimulated. But with a camera, the world shrinks to the size of the frame. It's helped quiet the noise. It's really meditative.
Photography also makes me hyper-aware of what I want to see. You’re not only documenting reality, but constructing your own reality and documenting your fantasies in front of the camera. It’s a dual way of experiencing both reality and fantasy. What’s special about photography is that you can assume that what you’re looking at is the truth. But ultimately, you also know that the frame you’re looking at can be a complete lie.
Q: How do you define success?
JL: My definition of success is that I’m happy to keep making and inspired by the people I’m surrounded by. I want to be 80 and still feel so happy that I’m alive and making. I don’t think I’m completely there, but I’m on the way.
Q: What was your childhood like?
JL: I had a pretty amazing childhood. Both my parents are Chinese. My dad grew up in San Francisco before moving to Texas. I had a very American childhood partly due to things my Dad experienced in Texas. My Dad was into all the American sports (football, baseball) so I played a lot of sports growing up. There was a lot of motivation to be a part of a team experience.
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My mom, on the other hand, was more traditional in the sense that she liked her Hong Kong dramas and Hong Kong culture. So there was this mixture of American masculine upbringing from my dad and a cultural inheritance from my mom.
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I went to a very white suburban school growing up (Wylie Groves High School). I was one of very few Asian American students so I was often questioning my Asian-Americanness. I was exploring what it meant to be a part of a team and what the American dream was for my family.
Please Take Off Your Shoes, Jarod Lew, UMMA 2025
Mimicry, Jarod Lew, UMMA 2025
Q: What inspired each exhibit in Strange You Never Knew?
JL: Please Take Off Your Shoes was inspired by revisiting the Vincent Chin history and wondering why I didn’t have an Asian American community growing up. I started off trying to take portraits of Asian Americans. I was using Facebook, Instagram, friends of friends, and even Tinder as a way of messaging people to ask if I could take pictures of them. My Tinder just had my artist bio with some sample pictures, my Instagram handle, and “please reach out if you see this.” While I started off making traditional portraits of them inside their house, it wasn’t until I brought them into their parents’ home that it created this whole narrative of alienation, invisibility, and visibility within an intergenerational home that really captured what it felt like being Asian-American in Michigan. That was the project that was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize.
Aperture then commissioned me to make In Between You and Your Shadow, which was prompted by the theme of “What does tomorrow look like?” I always thought my mom’s idea of tomorrow is now — the present day, after the Vincent Chin murder. That inspired me to make the work about my mom. But then of course, my mom didn’t want to be photographed, so I had to figure out how to pitch this project to her. I ended up covering her face and using the memory of my childhood to direct the photographs I made inside my parents’ house. It’s my way of showing how my mom is refusing your gaze and our collective understanding of this history. I wanted to prioritize my mom’s agency and right for opacity.
I made Mimicry at Yale. Previously, I went to an estate sale and found this family’s archive of Kodachrome slides from the 1950s labeled “Chinese block party.” It was just a bunch of white folks dressed in what they thought Chinese-ness was: kimonos, tea hats, etc. I thought it was super strange but I was obsessed with finding every picture made at that block party. I spent 3 days buying as many photographs as I could and stored these photos in my studio. It wasn’t until I got to Yale that I rediscovered this archive of photos and started to think about the performativity of race, the instability of whiteness, and performance in front of a camera. That inspired me to perform myself: I set up studio lights and sat in front of the camera, mimicking each facial expression and digitally collaging them in post-production.
Q: What does being an Asian American artist mean to you?
JL: That’s something I’m still working through. My latest projects (after Strange You Never Knew) pull away from more obvious Asian-American aesthetics. In Please Take Off Your Shoes, the objects feel just as important as the subject in the portrait. But as I’ve progressed, I’ve refined a way of looking where it’s not so on the nose — it’s more of a subtle way of making you look and having your own experiences infiltrate your reading. It’s more psychological. That’s my strategy now: Can I, as an Asian American artist, pull away from the obvious but still make work that deals with my identity in underlying ways?
"Can I, as an Asian-American artist, pull away from the obvious but still make work that deals with my identity in underlying ways?"
Q: What's your advice to aspiring photographers?
JL: You have to have the obsession to keep making. I think so many people have stopped making because they’ve attached the idea of art making with money and they just got burned out from doing anything creative. So remove any commercial aspect from the thing you want to make and just do it for yourself.
Don’t think necessarily about what other people are saying about what you’re doing. My parents completely did not want me to be a creative. They tried so hard: “Go work a corporate job. You don’t need this. You could do this as a hobby.” I refused to listen. I’d just divert the conversation. But I just kept making and expressing myself.