Meet Jacob Green

We were lucky to catch up with Jacob Green recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jacob, sincerely appreciate your selflessness in agreeing to discuss your mental health journey and how you overcame and persisted despite the challenges. Please share with our readers how you overcame. For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.
I have heavily relied on my friendships with colleagues and folks tied to my fraternal family. Being a photojournalist means taking on the responsibility of objectivity in reporting. This can be difficult for many photojournalists. Some of the events I have covered have been very difficult to overcome. Being attacked for being PRESS, or targeted for filming is a risk we take in the field, but, no journalist ever expects to be attacked for their craft. Post Traumatic Stress is a real battle for me and I often have to accept this. Acceptance is the first part of my healing process. I know I’ve been emotionally damaged, but, that does not mean I have to operate that way. When I apply this logic to myself, a sense of calm comes over me and I am pulled back into the moment at hand, rather than reflecting on the initial incident that created the PTSD symptoms.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I have been operating Aeon Photo Co. since 2014 when I graduated from college. In that time Aeon Photo went from a design company providing screen printing and graphic arts to a company providing audio and visual services such as videography, photography, and motion graphics.

The course of my life changed dramatically when I moved to a small town 70 miles east of Bakersfield, California, from Ashland, Oregon. During that time I applied for an assistant editor position at the Kern Valley Sun newspaper and was offered the job. Soon after I became the managing editor. However, I was determined to tackle larger stories with more complex details and this drove my interest to expand on the skills I learned at the Sun.

With all that said, I still offer more intimate photography services such as family portraits, headshots, events, and formal gatherings. I have not broken my desire to design clothing, and so I maintain a catalog of designs I have made which are available on my website www.aeonphoto.com.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Temperance, fortitude, and patience. These are virtues to strive for. These have helped me immensely in my work. Temperance because some of the situations I was faced with forced me to accept the circumstances of my environment and what I am filming at the time, which can sometimes be graphic, gory, and disturbing.

Many of the stories I cover are often chaotic, confusing, and most of all violent. Fortitude has helped me keep a steady shot during the times I had to express temperance. Continuing with my work has been the bottom line even through poverty, receiving death threats, and active misinformation campaigns from the fringes of the far-right wing, and the far left. Perseverance even in the face of a threat is a character builder.

This is why I feel that patience is the biggest virtue of them all. The ebb and flow of the world is impossible to master. There is not a soul on Earth who isn’t anxiety-ridden about the anticipation of either a positive or negative outcome to difficult situations. The best way I have found to use patience is by not pressing the unknown. I have to tell myself that the results of my work will unfold before me and offer me benefits if I am patient.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?
I am currently homeless, living out of my car with my dog. My family is unsupportive of my work because it challenges the narratives they have built around themselves. Narratives that are driven by misinformation.

This has made it difficult to keep a healthy relationship with my family and is one of the challenges that I face in being a reporter.

The costs of my equipment, travel, lodgings, my website, my online store, my dog, and my vehicle payments have put me into considerable debt. This has left me with very little to show for my large body of work.

The media industry is in a current collapse and much of the way news media is marketed to Americans is detrimental to the critical thinking of the population. Another challenge is attempting to insert my work into the mainstream where people can determine the truth based on visual and first-hand witness testimony.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Jake Lee Green/Aeon Photo Co.

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