Reality and Beauty Revealed in High Altitude
Jassen Todorov is an accomplished storyteller; his violin and camera are how he tells his stories. With an empathic heart and a keenly perceptive mind, Jassen sees beauty in music and landscapes because he believes they both possess structures, patterns, and colors that convey emotions for stories to be discovered and understood. Jassen tells his stories from an unfamiliar perspective: from above, in his plane. From that vantage, Jassen is able to produce mesmerizing images which stun the viewer.
At first, it was the natural landscapes that caught Jassen’s eyes while flying. In addition to the United States, he has flown in Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Botswana, UK, Iceland, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Spain, and the Philippines taking aerial shots of natural wonders.
Over the years, Jassen has witnessed from his plane how humanity’s activities have impacted the environment. So he began to document his critical findings and sent out alarms via his images. At the same time, Jassen used his camera to document how resilient communities respond to the cruelty wrought by nature (e.g., 2017 Santa Rosa Fire and the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise in California).
Jassen’s photos have won him many prestigious awards and they are featured in many magazines. For example, his image of thousands of Volkswagen and Audi diesel cars sitting idle in the Mojave Desert (near Victorville, California) reveals the shocking result of humanity’s greed. That image won him the grand prize held by the National Geographic’s 2018 photo contest. His other image of the damage done by the 2017 Santa Rosa fire, California won him the 2018 Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest American Experience Category. In 2019, seven of Jassen’s images were chosen by the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh for a large-scale open-air photography exhibition titled “A Human Touch”; the exhibition later traveled from Scotland to China.
Jassen grew up in a family of musical talents (his father was a violinist and his mother a sound engineer) in Bulgaria. He started his violin lessons at the age of five and later pursued higher education in music at a music conservatory in the U.S. He has played all across the world and for the past 18 years, he has taught violin at San Francisco State University.
While working on his DMA at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, Jassen started taking flying lessons. After he fulfilled all the certification requirements as a pilot, he then obtained a commercial flying license and was certified as a flying instructor. He bought a four-seater, single-engine plane in 2010. It was then when his triad of passions merged: music, photography, and flying.
When giving flight lessons, Jassen couldn’t help but notice the beautiful scenery on the ground so he started using his cell phone to take photos. Then he migrated to using DSLR cameras. Between 2013 and 2015, he upgraded his camera from a DSLR to a Nikon D810. He uses just one camera with one lens to shoot images while flying — it takes experience and excellent flying skills to make the sharp turn required to orient the plane’s side window towards the ground while at the same time letting go of the contol wheel long enough to manipulate the camera to take the shots.
When flying alone, he listens to all types of music. Jassen thinks flying, music, and photography complement one another. While immersed in the serenity and musical rhythms, Jassen is inspired to project and take the best shots.
Among all the natural landscapes, Jassen likes Death Valley in California the most. He likes the descent from nearby Mt. Whitney, 14,505 feet high, to land at the airport which is 252 feet below sea level; it has a very special effect for him. Plus, the rock formations are spectacular! He also likes the Painted Desert in Arizona which is near the Grand Canyon National Park. There, the rocks expose vibrant colors such as red, blue, and yellow; it is an ideal place for landscape photographers to hone their skills.
To Jassen, photography is not just about beautiful landscapes. He thinks the best photography is able to tell a story and to focus people’s attention on an idea. Over his flight time of almost twenty years, he has seen glaciers disappear in the Sierra Nevada mountain range and California’s rivers have significantly decreased in size and quantity. He is using his images to reveal the changes to our environment so that we as a collective force can take action.
