Jasper Wood (photographer)

Jasper Wood (January 2, 1921-June 7, 2002) was a self-taught writer and photographer and activist.

Biography

Jasper Wood was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, son of a traveling advertising salesman. In 1936 his family moved to Cleveland. He attended Cleveland Heights High School and in 1938, as a 17-year-old senior he acquired rights to publish Hemingway’s film script for The Spanish Earth on the Spanish Civil War, which Wood promoted in his introduction as Hemingway’s greatest contribution, though they had a disagreement when the author insisted on a disclaimer on the title page of the book.

Wood enrolled at Cleveland College in 1939, where he continued his interest in writing as assistant editor of Sky Line, the school's literary magazine. He wrote poetry and a play, and was the local jazz critic for DownBeat magazine in the 1940s. He survived by taking short-term jobs and in 1943 was employed in the advertising department for The Plain Dealer.

Photographer

In 1944 Jasper met and later married Nancy Manning, daughter of artist Wray Manning and co-director of the 1030 Gallery. They had their first child, Denis, in 1945 and the family traveled to Mexico while Wood worked on his first novel, and entranced by the indigenous tribes in the small villages surrounding Acapulco, Cuernavaca and San Cristóbal de las Casas, he took his first photos. The next year Wood purchased a 35 mm Contax II rangefinder camera and started taking pictures in Cleveland and in Ohio Amish Country. His principal subjects were inhabitants of the Scovill Avenue area of Cleveland, familiar to him from his visits to jazz clubs in the neighbourhood in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He first exhibited his work in 1947 at the Cleveland Museum of Art's annual May Show, the first of subsequent May show awards;  in 1949, 1951, 1953 and two honourable mentions in 1947, 1952.  In the meantime Wood began writing reviews of local jazz musicians for the Cleveland Press and Downbeat Magazine, and made a regular income as an advertising agent.

Around 1949 Wood and his young family moved to 1294 Spruce Court in the Lakeview Terrace, one of the nation’s first federally funded housing projects, and in the 1950s Wood had several one-man and two-man shows of imagery made in the neighbourhood. Venues included Image Gallery (New York City), the San Francisco Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum and an exhibition of Scovill photographs at the 1030 Gallery in Cleveland from February 19-March 11, 1950. His "Girl with Doll”, part of the Scovill series, won first place in the 1951 American Photography magazine annual contest. Also that year, the Akron Art Institute held a joint show by Jasper Wood and friend Harry Schulke who were each asked to invite 13 photographers to exhibit work alongside theirs.  Wood invited Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen, and Bernice Abbott.

Edward Steichen chose Wood’s photograph of a small barefoot Mexican girl carrying a basket in front of a wooden door for the 1955 world-touring the Museum of Modern Art exhibit The Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors.

Wood’s motivation in making photographs was existential and humanist, and he was not interested in deriving profit from or making a career of a creative medium which he regarded as a means to connect with his subject and to capture what he called, in a paraphrase of Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’, the ‘felt moment seen’. For a living, he and partner Carl Malmquist established Malmquist and Wood advertising art studio in 1955, a concern profitable enough that the family no longer qualified to live in the projects where they had built a modest life and they relocated to a three-bedroom apartment in Cleveland Heights where they lived a more privileged existence.

Later career

Wood’s interest in photography wavered but his love of art continued, bringing him success as an art dealer. A film society he’d founded screened others works at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Masonic Temple.

When his friend Nico Jacobellis was arrested on obscenity charges in 1959 for showing Louis Malle’s The Lovers at the Heights Art Theater, Wood founded Citizens for Freedom of the Mind. Through it he raised funds for the defence of bookseller James Lowell and counterculture poet d.a. levy against charges of obscenity corrupting a minor during their poetry reading on November 15, 1966. Wood had stopped taking photographs altogether by 1960 and by 1970 he had closed Malmquist and Wood for an early retirement and he and Manning, married at last, purchased a house in San Cristobal, living in Mexico until 1973 when Wood returned to work as an advertising agent, relocating to Raleigh, North Carolina, to be near his eldest son.

Wood died in 2002, survived by his sons Denis and Chris and his wife who died in 2008.