Jason Cantrell, Founder &
Lead Photographer
"I have been a photographer for most of my life, although for much of that time, I had no idea what kind of photographer I was supposed to be.
My dad played music, and when I was about five years old, he would hand me his Pentax K1000 during band practice. I would wander off with it, looking for things to photograph. I’m sure most of the resulting photographs were terrible. Fortunately for his budget, the camera often didn’t actually contain film.
Still, something about reducing the world to four edges stuck with me. More than four decades later, I’m essentially doing the same thing.
I’m Jason Cantrell, Founder, Lead Photographer, and Aspiring Hermit at Cantrell Architectural Media. These days, I spend my time photographing extraordinary homes, architecture, hospitality properties, and commercial spaces around the country.
Getting here was not particularly direct..."
Jason began working professionally in Chicago around 2000, photographing the kinds of things young photographers convince themselves are profound. Flowers. Garbage in alleys. Fortunes from fortune cookies lying in gutters. Things on train platforms.
Eventually, somebody gave him something more useful to photograph. People. That opened everything up.
Jason went on to photograph portraits, families, seniors, weddings, events, and sports. He worked as a newspaper stringer, covering everything from high school games and community events to press appearances, celebrities, and national news.
He joined a portrait studio, eventually bought it, and grew the operation to include multiple photographers, assistants, and interns.
For years, he lived in a world full of people, photographing portraits, headshots, life events, commercial work, products, and almost anything else someone was willing to put in front of his camera.
He loved photography. He did not necessarily love photographing people.
That discovery worked out remarkably well.
In 2020, Jason was maintaining a corporate career that had become increasingly difficult to reconcile with the life he actually wanted. He began photographing more interiors and architecture. Then more. Then almost exclusively.
For the first time in his career, everything clicked.
He could walk into a remarkable house on top of a mountain and be completely alone. He could spend an hour studying the way afternoon light moved through a room. He could obsess over half an inch of camera position without anyone asking what they were supposed to do with their hands.
It was glorious.
More importantly, architectural photography brought together nearly every skill he had collected during the previous twenty years.
Today, Jason photographs hundreds of properties each year, from cabins and vacation homes to luxury residences, commercial spaces, and architectural projects across the country. He still approaches the best ones with the same curiosity he had while wandering around Chicago with a camera more than twenty years ago.
There will always be photographers who can do the job cheaper, faster, or who are more willing to tell a client exactly what they want to hear. If checking a box is the objective, Jason is probably an unnecessarily expensive solution to a fairly simple problem.
But when someone has invested hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars into creating something distinctive, he is not interested in giving them the same pictures as everyone else.
Jason takes being trusted with the final step of that process seriously.
Away from work, Jason loves old things, weird things, forgotten things, and anything that has already lived a few lives. He works on old cars, designs guitars, sews, makes art, and takes on projects he has absolutely no business attempting.
There is usually some combination of sawdust, grease, thread, paint, blood, and leftover parts involved.
His daughter, Cadence, gets pulled into many of these projects, creating some of his favorite days. The Shih Tzus are usually nearby too. Rumi travels with him often enough that she has become part dog, part road companion, and part unpaid employee.
Then there is Melba the Snail, Jason’s 1973 Volkswagen bus and one of the best terrible ideas he has ever had. She is old, slow, temperamental, and remarkably efficient at turning money into mechanical problems.
Melba appeals to the same part of Jason’s brain as photography. He wants to understand how things fit together, why they work, and what might make them better.
Jason will happily drive hundreds of miles to photograph an extraordinary building, then detour another hour because someone mentioned an abandoned motel, an unusual piece of roadside architecture, or a town containing something nobody thought was worth tearing down yet.
He is fascinated by places, especially those that carry evidence of the people who imagined them, built them, used them, abandoned them, or cared about them.
Photography has given him an excuse to spend his life looking closely at those places.
After all these years, he still walks into somewhere new, looks around, and figures out which four edges tell the story best.
Preferably while everyone else leaves him alone.
Except Cadence and the Shih Tzus. They are always welcome.