Photographer Jessica Lehrman on creative adventures

“In terms of photography and the photo world, I’m doing everything wrong,” says photographer Jessica Lehrman of her craft. We’re not sure that’s entirely accurate, if her work’s to be believed. It’s spontaneous and so full of life it seems to leap out of the frame, just as she leaps about so joyfully creating it. A new film from InFrame shows Jessica going about her practice, which as she tells us focusses entirely on shooting “people I love.” This is mostly friends and family, but even when she’s commissioned to capture people she doesn’t yet know, she makes a point of digging into their personalities and getting under their skin.

Jessica’s childhood was a nomadic one, travelling around in a transit van and home-schooled by her “hippie” parents. Before landing on photography, she wanted to be a “belly dancer, a herbal practitioner and a burlesque dancer,” before deciding she’d rather like to be a painter. She applied for the Rhode Island School of Art and Design but was too late for the painting course, and landed in photography with very little idea what the discipline was all about. Still, she learned fast, but decided after four months to sack off the whole degree and go it alone. “I don’t want to be a struggling artist,” she says. “But money is not my end goal, in my family the end goal is adventure.”