Jason Grow hates to be interviewed, and would barely tell me anything, so I had to resort to what I know about him: He makes delicious homemade pasta, even pizzocheri, the buckwheat pasta from Northern Italy impossible to find in this country. A rough cut dough cooked with kale, potatoes, fontina cheese, sage, butter and garlic, pizzocheri was born in the Italian Alps and happily immigrated in Jason’s capable hands to New England ski-slopes as the perfect ending to a day on skis. Jason worked at Stars, Jeremiah Towers' San Francisco restaurant and celebrity chef incubator. He worked at Chez Panisse for one day, then said, "unh, no, I don't want to do this," and he went back to Stars.
Jason's the kind of Dad who makes homemade marshmallows for his kids’ hot chocolate. I’m fairly certain that one of his life-goals is to master cheese.
Jason’s height - tall, very tall - still surprises me. His gentle, freckled face and eyes, which flash unchecked from deep and sad to the laughter that knows there’s a whoopie cushion on the teacher’s chair, still have all the freshness of a fifth-grade boy running out to recess. His daughters - Matilda, 13, and twins Jemima and Maisy, 10, share his strawberry blond hair and fair skin.
Jason built a play-house for his daughters that many people would be happy renting for a summer.
He met his wife, Sarah, in a California wild fire. Both were photographers covering the fires and the fighters, and bumped camera equipment trying to out-run the burning brush.
The Grows live in one of the trim, turn-of-the-century East Gloucester houses that was probably once home to a successful cod fisherman or net-maker. To support his fresh pasta habit and to keep curtains in the playhouse, Jason takes muscular but refined, intimate but formal, stately but accessible photographs of people, including me, here.
He’d rather talk about the posole he made for the guys putting a new roof on his house than his photograpy, so I have to reference his bio, which is really just an extension of his modesty: “Jason Grow specializes in photographing exceptionally accomplished busy people with real time constraints in real environments.” I’ll list the sexier journals on his long list of editorial clients: Time, Forbes, The New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Barron’s Bloomberg Business Week, Sports Illustrated. He’s taken photographs of Ray Tomlinson, the father of email, Maine organic farmers Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch, author Kate Braestrup, (I loved her book, “Here if You Need Me”), lots and lots of guys in suits looking either sternly or playfully wealthy, and pioneers. The kinds of magazines Jason shoots for likes a good pioneer - a geneticist or a crazy IT guy. Close to his heart, Jason shot Best Chefs in Boston for a Boston Magazine cover.
He hates having his picture taken as I learned when he came to my house to take mine, but he’s returning soon with Sarah and the girls soon so we can all make Christmas Tamales. That will be a blog you shouldn’t miss.
Check out his work at http://jasongrow.com.