Life & Work with Brandon Kapelow of Glassell Park

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brandon Kapelow.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My story begins as an 8-year old growing up in western Wyoming. I was living in a home with a father who was struggling with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and a mother who was doing all she could to insulate me from the difficulty of that experience. Over the course of several years my dad went on to make several suicide attempts and ultimately took his own life when I was twelve years old.
That cataclysm forced me onto a journey of self-discovery at a much earlier age than many of my peers. I entered high school the year after the loss of my father and I remember feeling the immense weight of the void he left behind, which created a powerful vacuum that I was eager to fill.

I was incredibly fortunate to find that first opportunity when I was invited to join my school’s speech & debate team. I came to learn that the coach was also a suicide loss survivor – a categorization that would prove to be definitive in my life – having lost his spouse a few years prior. He quickly became a mentor and taught me how to channel my grief into an outlet that could provide tangible benefits for myself and others. He also introduced me to the world of advocacy through the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), for whom I continue to volunteer to this day.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, Wyoming is one of the states that consistently ranks highest in the country for rates of suicide death. Being on the debate team provided me with the opportunity to traverse the state, and at my coach’s encouragement I decided to make my loss the focal point of my competition. Every weekend I would travel to different high schools and give speeches on the topic of suicide prevention, and I was quickly surprised to discover how common it was to find other people my age with shared experience with that issue. A profound moment came when a student approached me after an event and thanked me for sharing my story; they too had lost a parent to suicide and had never been given the opportunity to talk about it. That cemented a passion for mental health advocacy that has proven to be foundational in my life and career.

The next pivotal discovery for me came that same year when I took a video class that exposed me to the world of lens-based storytelling. I quickly became obsessed, devouring film and photography classes both in and out of school. I took summer courses, attended extracurriculars, did an internship for a local company that made ski movies, and ultimately decided to apply to film school. Like many cinema neophytes, that led me on a pilgrimage to Southern California in 2010, when I attended Chapman University as an undergraduate to study film production.

Chapman has a strong pipeline between its student population and young journeymen working in the industry in technical trades, so there was an organic bridge that allowed me to start working on film sets almost immediately after graduation. Given my love of cameras I gravitated to both direction and cinematography in school, and those skills allowed me to find jobs as a camera assistant on music videos and commercials. I quickly rose through the camera department and started working as a cinematographer for fellow directors I’d met in school. Before long I was getting opportunities to direct unit photography or co-direct with friends, then ultimately I started directing commercials and short documentaries on my own.

It took a decade of living and working in California before the next evolution of my career took hold. For those initial years of living in LA I was so preoccupied with cutting my teeth that I’d lost touch with my sense of passion for what I was doing. In the background I’d continued working as a volunteer with AFSP’s Greater Los Angeles Chapter and doing peer-support facilitating with a local organization called SOLACE, which I found incredibly meaningful, but I was lacking that sense of purpose in my professional life.

Then 2020 happened and my life was upended for a second time. As a result of the pandemic I went that entire calendar year without a paying job and, naturally, my own mental health really started to suffer. I grapple with PTSD stemming from the loss of my dad, and that sense that life was starting to get out of control again brought back a lot of the same feelings I had from when I was a child. I found myself frequently depressed and anxious, stuck at home and cut off from the usual methods I had developed for coping.

But once again, I received a lifeline that came in the form of an unexpected mentorship. It was April of 2020 and I was desperate for a creative outlet, so I signed up for a 1-on-1 online course through the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP). Through that program I was introduced to Magnum photographer Matt Black, who I met monthly on Zoom for the remainder of the year. He encouraged me to merge my passions for mental health with visual media for the first time, which honestly had never occurred to me before.

In December of that year I went back home to spend time with my family and partner at my childhood home in Wyoming. I was at a pretty low point personally, and didn’t have any disposable income to spend on hobbies or other distractions. So at Matt’s encouragement I started researching statistics about suicide in America and was surprised to learn that many of the most impacted regions were within a short drive of where I grew up. So I picked up a camera and did some day trips to photograph landscapes connected to that issue, and what emerged from that trip was the seed of an idea for a body of work called Somewhere I Belong that I’ve been working on ever since. The title is derived from the name of a song by the late musician Chester Bennington, who also died by suicide.

My connection with Matt Black led to a yearlong mentorship program at Magnum Photos where I was able to further develop and refine my project into a more polished form. The goal of the series is to create a mosaic that explores the issue of suicide through the many different demographics that contribute to such disproportionately high rates across the West. I produced a first chapter on the county in New Mexico with the highest suicide rate in the contiguous United States, which was published in TIME Magazine in October of 2022. That opportunity opened a whole new set of doors in my career and led to subsequent follow-up stories in Idaho and Alaska for The New York Times and NPR.

Today, I’m continuing to develop additional stories for Somewhere I Belong for editorial outlets, as well as a feature documentary that will coalesce all the separate threads I’ve explored into a single, unified narrative. And across all my work – whether that be in my capacity as a filmmaker, a photojournalist or as a commercial director – I’ve sought to make human health my central focus.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’ve always found that the periods of my life where I’ve experienced the most growth were always in the wake of a major crisis. Whether it be the loss of my dad, the global pandemic, or my own struggles with mental health – these ‘force majeure’ events in our lives have a tendency to shake us out of our ordinary routine and afford us some perspective to look at ourselves in the mirror with fresh eyes. That can often be a painful and tumultuous process in the moment, but I’ve always felt that by the time you reach the other side you emerge as a more intentional and grounded person. It’s difficult to look tragedy or hardship in the face and continue living the way you did before. It helps me find gratitude in both obvious and unexpected places.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Ever since the pandemic, my focus has been on telling stories related to human health in all its forms. I’m a firm believer that mental and physical health are inseparable and holistic, so my passion is for using visual media to help dispel stigma and engage deeper conversations around these critical topics. Health crosses the traditional cultural fault lines of race, class, politics and geographic borders – so the stories I feel drawn to are often equally varied in the subjects they address. But I get particularly excited to explore narratives in rural communities where access to resources can be much more limited and open dialogue is often considered taboo.

In a strange way, the main aspect of my resume that makes me particularly qualified to do this work has nothing to do with my professional training or skills. It’s my personal experience with loss that has proven to be the skeleton key that’s unlocked the most opportunities in my life and career – whether that be in my ability to connect with an interview participant on a personal level, or in how I pitch prospective projects to grant funders or publishers.

I published a trio of projects in the past year that I feel reflect the full spectrum of what I’m trying to accomplish. The first was an Op-Doc for the New York Times documenting the use of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy in treating workplace trauma for first responders. The second was a feature story and radio piece for NPR addressing Alaska Native-led suicide prevention efforts in the nation’s most impacted county. And the third was a PSA for the Canadian Cancer Society exploring the ways that stigma around smoking has led to deficits in lung cancer research.

Beyond the emphasis on health-related topics, the common thread running through each of these projects is a focus on solutions-based storytelling. We are constantly being bombarded by media highlighting the various problems going on in the world around us. Tragedy can feel omnipresent, whether it be something we experience in our own personal lives, or something quickly accessed through the screens of our devices. So in my view, it feels more important than ever to present the public with hopeful narratives, or opportunities to funnel our angst into a productive venue.

What makes you happy?
The current stage of growth I’m confronting in my life comes around a re-evaluation of this very question – what makes me truly happy? I think that answer is constantly evolving (sometimes on an hourly basis), and it takes practice and time for reflection to be closely attuned to our own needs. For years I would feel I had some sense of understanding of what made me happy and would go barreling down a path that I thought would lead me in that direction, only to find much later that somewhere along the way my needs had changed and were no longer being served by the life I was living.

That’s been a really hard but important lesson for me, both as a creative professional and as a human being. For the past five years I’ve been fueled by a newfound sense of purpose and clarity in my career ambitions, but only recently I’ve had to recognize that I needed to feel equally purposeful and content in my personal life to be truly happy. And I can’t say I’m anywhere close to achieving that ever-elusive balance, but I’m feeling much more aware and intentional about that need.

Making more time and space for reflection has been a critical part of that growth for me. Like many others, I took up a TM practice in the wake of David Lynch’s death – something I’d put off for years but finally felt compelled enough to pursue. That exercise, along with time set aside to slow down with family and friends has been tremendously helpful in overcoming a sense of burnout and starting to find happiness again.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.brandonkapelow.com
• Instagram: @bkapelow
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-kapelow-841189257/