About Ben Brashear

As all things legend, my interest in photography and story telling started long ago. When I was maybe five or six, my mother enlisted me as a model for her photography classes at UNM in Albuquerque, NM. Later on in middle school, it was the late night stories between my grandfather and uncle exchanged over cups of hot coffee that encouraged me to "borrow" my mother's 35mm Olympus for weeks on end. I was enchanted by their tall tales of near misses and larger-than-life adventures photographing desert lighting storms, crime scenes for the paper, and getting that perfect picture of a Howitzer being fired for a live training exercise. Throughout high school and college thanks to a few inspiring professors, the power of narrative became entwined with my passion for photography and my desire to document a lifetime of experience featuring my own near misses– adventures climbing, lightning strikes trail running, backpacking, motorcycle racing,  and building a custom rock crawler here in Colorado. I am thankful for my passion which has led to studying with master photographer Jan Pohribn´y through Charles University in Prague, to the often wild journey documenting athletes charging the highest peaks of the San Juan mountains, to engaging with truly unique individuals, to years of creating higher education marketing and branding content for Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, to my current pursuits in commercial, editorial, and portrait photography.  I can't wait to see where the next 20-years of photography takes me.