Jasmine Ross is a lens-based artist from Oakland, California, now living and working in the Bay Area. She currently serves as the Gallery Associate at SF Camerawork, a nonprofit organization, where she is committed to uplifting emerging artists and fostering spaces that prioritize equity and access in the arts. This role has deepened her understanding of the operational and business dimensions of art institutions, knowledge she sees as essential to creating sustainable pathways for underrepresented artists.

Her commitment to supporting artists is rooted in her academic background. A recent graduate of Yale University, Ross earned a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, as well as in Art. She combines these disciplines in her own practice, using image-making as a tool for social impact and ethnographic study.

Being a multi-racial Black woman, her fine-arts documentary photography explores themes of identity politics as a site of negotiation, intergenerational trauma and joy, and ancestral heritage - elements that inform her evolving sense of self and place.

Working primarily with medium and large format cameras, Ross embraces the slow, deliberate nature of using these devices, allowing her pause to truly see the unseen. The heavy equipment, the rudimentary process of using a dark cloth to see the upside down and inverted image through the ground glass, the time to develop, scan, and edit the photos – all require a level of intentionality that, while time consuming and financially precious– are what makes Ross’s photos unique, demanding her to understand the value in each individual shot. 

As an analog-first photographer, Ross values the tears that come with a stomach-dropping empty roll of film, and also the joy of a double exposure or a light leak that are unnatural to the digital process. Ross finds beauty in the traditional failures of the Dark Room, ultimately speaking to her success as an artist.

Raised by Black survivalist entrepreneurs, the grounding ideology for much of Ross’s work is to honor and give flowers to such community-builders before her, while ensuring that these flowers are received during their lifetime. In her debut group show, Tell It Slant, exhibited at the Yale School of Art, Ross explored similar narratives regarding the realities of small business ownership, acknowledging the endurance, communal care, and sacrifice involved in upholding these mom and pop sites of mutual support. For this show specifically, Ross documented the closure of Beauty Plus, a 31-year old Black-owned New Haven beauty supply store.