A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish

If you walked down Colorado Boulevard in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles at some point in the past three years, you might have noticed a modest, pueblo-style beige building with “PHOTO” painted above its door. And if you had decided to go in, there was a decent chance you’d know the person working the counter. This part of town is on the up; the adjacent building was sitting empty and in disrepair for at least 15 years, but it recently became a Turkish textile and loungewear shop. Down the street is an artisanal cheese store. Two spots up is a Taco Bell—gentrification does not scare the Taco Bell—but if you were hungry, you could always try the photo shop, where there were sometimes donuts around for the taking. 

Even those who have never been to LA might have been familiar with Eagle Rock Camera & Goods, which opened in 2023, because it was regularly advertised to the 450,000 Instagram followers of the store’s proprietor, pro skater turned actor turned fine-art photographer Jason Lee. You could buy analog cameras or photo books at the shop. If you’re like me, you could browse in order to motivate yourself to dig your old film camera out of the closet. Or you could just hang out, talk art, and make friends. “It’s kind of a little local community hang spot as much as it is a retail store,” Lee told me while sitting on a couch in the back of the shop, next to a refrigerator filled with film available for purchase. 

Some of those who recognize Lee from his acting may reasonably hesitate at the offer of a pastry or treat; one of Lee’s most famous bits, from Kevin Smith’s 1995 movie Mallrats, is when his character Brodie rubs his hand in his asscrack before giving a nemesis a chocolate-covered pretzel. These are the types of roles that made Lee an omnipresent face in a certain sector of Gen X cinematic malaise: He would play invariably scruffy, wise-ass sarcasm machines banking on their charm to guide them through the world. Their names were Earl, or Banky, or Beaver, and they tended to capture an idealistic form of degeneracy—one in which a lack of ambition didn’t reflect a lack of latent intelligence.