Byron Mason: Man With A Purpose

It’s nearly 1am on a Tuesday and I’ve found myself in yet another inner tug-of-war with the clock that I will ultimately and miserably lose. Try as I might, the resetting of another day from PM to AM always brings about the ugly reality that I must, against all of my exuberance and ambitious musings, take my ass to bed. These late hours I keep come quite naturally for me, for I’ve never been one to wake with the roosters. When I was in undergrad it was never an issue, I just scheduled all my classes after 11am. But now, I have a job, and each and every night I’m required to restrain my creative energy and often alcohol-infused social outings to ensure that I am bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the office in the morning. I resent it, not only because it reminds me of my social status as a corporate hack, but it utterly thwarts my truest life calling of doing complete jack shit for the greater part of daylight hours. Having a 9 to 5 ultimately means that each of my creative meanders, from photography, DJ-ing, writing or just artistically laying about are all road blocked as a result of the inescapable need to make money. Granted it’s a choice I willfully make, but when my alarm goes off each morning and I haul myself out of bed after sleeping only five hours, I can’t help bemoan how much it bites to have to try and fit in my life, after 6pm.
To be honest I really can’t complain. After all, the benefit of having a steady gig is that it allows me to travel pretty regularly. My hard earned vacation days are something I’m fully committed to using, often, and having the opportunity to see the world from different perspectives has dramatically (and positively) shifted the way I move through life.  As an American, travelling abroad requires me to widen my view on how other people live on this planet.
As a black man, traveling helps let some much needed fresh air into my consciousness, relieving some of the frustration and pressure that can build up over time and is often misunderstood here at home. Make no mistake, for me traveling isn’t about frivolity or fabulousness; it’s about maintaining my sanity. It’s about restoring my sometimes fragile faith in humanity by changing the channel for a while and deliberately pushing the limits of my understanding. Through seeing my country from afar I’ve come to discover over and over again the good that lies in people and how much we can learn from those outside our borders.
Politics aside, what travel gives me most are infinite sources of inspiration and ideas which ultimately influence my art.  It doesn’t matter if I’m standing shoulder to shoulder on a packed commuter train in Tokyo, reading a book in a park in Buenos Aires, or trekking through a rainforest in Mexico, there’s no better encouragement for me to create than boarding a plane and within a matter of hours finding myself in an entirely different culture, different language and food, and being forced to figure things out. As a photographer and DJ, to be confronted with an entirely new set of sights and sounds affords me never-ending opportunities to capture diverse moments in time and interpret them through my camera and my turntables. It allows me to absorb elements of different cultures and bring them home to mash together in a collection of beats, images and words. As clichéd as it may sound, I’ve come to see travel as my classroom, the streets of foreign cities as my office. The learning I’ve gained as a result is immeasurable and the energy, excitement and late-night creativity that it helps to inspire go way beyond any amount of education or promotion. Sharing all that I’ve experienced and translating it into art is really what makes my world go round, and it’s what keeps me traveling and continually going back or more.
Byron Mason lives in the Mission District of San Francisco, California where can be found sleeping in late on most weekends. To see (and hear) what inspires him go to www.byronmason.com.

Written by Byron Mason