Eight years ago, Jason Lee traveled across the Sooner State visiting small towns and making photos with 35mm, 120 and 4×5 color and black-and-white film that resulted in a Philbrook exhibition a year later.
The skateboarder-turned-actor-turned-photographer returned to Tulsa Thursday to celebrate the release of his photography book “OK/BW” at a sold-out Magic City Books event.
Featuring 75 black-and-white images from the collection, the book is limited to 650 copies and was published in association with Philbrook Art & Gardens. Limited copies are available at the bookstore and the museum gift shop.
“Here’s kind of what Oklahoma looks like in black and white if you get in your car and just ride around and get kicked out of town by gunwheeling tow truck drivers,” Lee said about his book as he laughed.
The nonprofit bookstore was filled to capacity with about 100 attendees — some traveling from as far as Dallas-Fort Worth — to hear Lee share stories of his travels and the journey to finishing his first of two books. A second volume, “OK/CL,” will feature color images from the collection and is set for publication in 2028.
Magic City Books co-founder Jeff Martin returned home from Seattle to moderate the conversation that he started with Lee nearly a decade ago, when he pitched the project to Lee as a Philbrook employee.
The original concept was for Lee to make photographs in Tulsa and then be done, but he’d just published his photography book of images from his Texas travels. The experience got him thinking about the scope of the job.
He countered with the idea “to go outside of the city limits and kind of just roam around as I’d done before in California and Texas,” Lee said.
The Philbrook team agreed, and over six months Lee traveled from his then-home in Denton, Texas, and wandered Oklahoma for days at a time.
And yes, there really was an incident, in a town of 49, when Lee was taking pictures before an armed tow truck driver pulled up and told the photographer he wasn’t welcome and needed to move on. Lee obliged and watched the tow truck follow him until he had exited city limits in what he called “a very Hitchcock experience.”
“The discovery is the most interesting aspect of it,” Lee said. “There’s a kind of romantic quality to the nooks and crannies and the back roads and the outways and that kind of banged up, beautiful kind of characteristics of the town that feels unlike any place I’ve ever been or that is familiar to me from my childhood.”
On view from June to December 2019, “OK: Jason Lee Photographs” featured selected prints from the collection spanning the Meinig and Burnstein Galleries in the museum’s former satellite location, Philbrook Downtown — now the Bob Dylan Center.
Lee started out as a pro skateboarder and said he likely traveled through Oklahoma as a teen during tour stops. As an adult, his only frame of reference of the state before visiting in 2018 was Francis Ford Coppola’s movie adaptations of “The Outsiders” and “Rumble Fish,” which Lee said influenced his vision for the project.
“It’s kind of a no-no in art and photography, but I’m OK with romanticizing things,” Lee said. “I think there’s always room for a little bit of romanticizing. You kind of have to have some sense of connection to a thing. I’m not afraid to admit that if I see a certain scene or the way something feels to me, I’m attracted to it in that way, whether it’s an ordinary scene or something that reminds me of some earlier trip I was on where I felt a certain way.”
News decisions at the Tulsa Flyer are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
