(Updated at 2:25 p.m.) ARLnow Staff Photographer, Jay Westcottis moving away from the news industry – but he’s not putting his camera aside just yet.
At 51, Westcott is leaving the fast-paced world of daily news photography to focus on those aspects of photography that align with his other passions, including portraiture, storytelling and music.
“I’m looking forward to just focusing on the things I’m really good at,” he told ARLnow.
Growing up in Battle Creek, Michigan, about two hours west of Detroit, Westcott showed a passion for photography from an early age, often using his father’s camera to take photos of his high school directory. It wasn’t until after high school, when he joined the U.S. Navy, that Westcott’s passion for the visual medium began to blossom.
Four years after joining the service while Westcott was aboard the USS Roosevelt, a Navy photographer reignited his interest in photographic work.
“He had this really cool camera…and I loved what he could do with it, the photos he could get out of it, and he convinced me to buy a camera,” said Westcott.
He wrote to his mother asking her to send him his father’s camera and to buy a Canon 35mm autofocus SLR. In the years that followed, he documented life aboard the ship and the countries he visited around the Mediterranean, including Rhodes, Greece, and Venice, Italy.
Westcott, who is also a guitarist, remembers the day he decided to leave the Navy and pursue photography. One day, while browsing Guitar World magazine in his bunk, he came across a photograph by famous Seattle-based American photographer Charles Peterson promoting his new book “Touch Me I’m Sick.”
“Instead of being one of the guys in the photos in the magazine, I wanted to be the one taking the photo,” Westcott said.
In 1996, Westcott was honorably discharged from the Navy and headed to Virginia Beach, where he met his ex-wife and sold cars for several years before moving to Northern Virginia.
In the summer of 2000, at the age of 28, Westcott enrolled at Northern Virginia Community College, then transferred a year later to George Mason University to study photography. About a year into his tenure at George Mason, and disillusioned with the program, Westcott applied and was accepted for a fellowship at the Corcoran College of Art and Design (now part of George Washington University) in Washington DC.
“I went there for three years and loved every second of it,” he said.
Westcott’s first big success was a paid internship at the Scripps-Howard news office in Washington, D.C., which operated for 96 years, from 1917 to 2013. What launched his career, however, was the chance observation of an armored truck robbery near McPherson Square Park. where he saw a man brandishing a shotgun.
“So I go out and take a few pictures, then I go down to the street and take a few more pictures,” he said. “The guy was taken by ambulance while he was handcuffed.”
Photos taken by Westcott that day were picked up by the Washington Post, which offered Westcott a full-time job shortly afterward.
“I felt like I started at the top,” he said.
