Jason Andrew - Football's Lost Boys

Jason Andrew

Jason Andrew began his career as an elementary school teacher in San Diego, CA working primarily with undocumented and underprivileged children in the South Bay. Jason began teaching with the intention of shaping and molding the young minds of his students but it was his students who ended up shaping who he was as a person. Their stories of poverty and abuse helped him make his decision to follow a lifelong dream of photographing the inequalities of the world with the hope that his pictures would make a difference to the people he documented one day. In 2006, feeling fed-up with the education system, Jason packed up everything and moved to NYC where he attended the International Center of Photography Documentary and Photojournalism Program. Since graduating in 2007, Jason's work has focused on the people and societies that have struggled to live amongst the atrocities brought upon them by Mother Nature and mankind. Jason's recent work explores contemporary social and economic issues, walking a thin line between art and documentary work. His most recent series “Reclaiming America; The Tea Party Movement into Conservative America,” Jason hopes to provide a visual documentation of the movement, expressing his personal sense of loneliness and abandonment that he felt while traveling across the country with them in their busses as they preached Conservative values and Christianity. Jason has also taken up a long-term project titled "Football's Lost Boys," documenting African footballers that have been trafficked into Turkey through a growing football scam in Africa. As he has watched and heard stories of these young men struggle with poverty, racism and police brutality, he hopes to open the eyes of the international football community to the growing problem through his pictures and their written testimonies.