About Me
Brent Winebrenner
̌
On Location. Around the Corner. Around the World.
Stories are powerful things that can turn your life on a dime if you listen. I know because one man’s story fundamentally changed my own.
In perhaps the most popular article National Geographic ever published, Peter Jenkins described finding his way in life by setting out to walk across America. He wrote with clarity and passion about what he discovered about himself, about America and the good people he met during his five-year journey. It was painfully obvious to me that Peter’s life was full of adventure and mine wasn’t. Before I finished the article, I was deep in the throes of a mid-life crisis. I was eighteen.
That night I talked a friend into dropping out of college. We bought a van, worked odd jobs and traveled around the American West. We learned how to survive on a shoestring and I fell in love with life on the road. To my regret and my parent's relief I went back to school when our time was up. But, I'd been hopelessly spoiled by the freedom and adventure. So as soon as I could scrape some money together, I was off to Europe to ride the rails, take pictures and breath deeply of life.
When the cash ran out, I slunk back to college and graduated, much to my surprise, with a degree in accounting. I managed to pass the CPA exam on the first go and landed a job with a prestigious international accounting firm. After five years of balancing balance sheets, I flamed out and bought an open return ticket to Hong Kong and crash landed in Chungking Mansion. The low-budget flop house was a magnet for dirt-bag travelers and I soon fell in with a handful of hard-core, long-time Asia travelers who were heading to China.
Back in the mid-80's, independent budget travel in China was absolutely, unrelentingly brutal. Sealed off for decades, the People's Republic of China had just begun to allow solo travelers to move without a guide or minder. Because of the long history ofnear total isolation, there was no English to be found - anywhere. Most Chinese, outside Shanghai or Beijing, had never even seen a foreigner, other than perhaps a Russian apparatchik. Looking back, it is hard to imagine that China could have been so poor, so backward, and so totally unaffected by luxury brands and cell phone technology. The complete lack of anything familiar created a sense of other worldliness is what made "China Travel" such a maddening, wonderful, bad-ass adventure. It was never easy, but I survived for four months traveling deep into the belly of Asia. The excitement of being among the first Westerners to get off the bus in magical places like Tibet and the Taklimakan Desert was intoxicating. I'd never been more present and alive.
Gyantse, Tibet. Reinhard, Sharon, myself and Jean Pierre.
Eventually, the cash ran out again, and I fell back into the grind of earning a corporate living. The work was interesting and the money was good, but I was bored beyond tears. After a few years I quit, married gringa and moved to hill overlooking a beach in Costa Rica. We opened a wood shop, carved out a place in the wilderness and learned how to build furniture with a book in one hand and tool in the other. It was great fun for awhile - until life in the jungle began to unravel. When we lost all of our belongings in a series of robberies, we returned to the states – separately.
By now, my corporate resume was so riddled with holes that I finally decide to pursue photography, the one passion other than traveling that held my attention since high school. I enrolled at the Brooks Institute of Photography, gave them what was left of my savings and learned how to light while earning a Masters in the Science of Photography. When I graduated, I joined the Brooks Visual Journalism faculty, remarried, and built a freelance career as a travel and location photographer and filmmaker.
I’ve had the great good fortune to experience over 70 countries, shooting for a variety of corporate, editorial and publishing clients. My editorial credits include National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic Adventure, Sunset, Santa Barbara Magazine, California Homes, Wine Spectator, Modern Bride, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and dozens of Lonely Planet publications. I've contributed to numerous shelter books and photographed The Splendor of Cuba, a Rizzoli publication that was noted for being one of the best photography books of 2011.
Corporate clients include Kendall-Jackson, Foley Family Wines, Scheid Family Wines, Katrina Lines, Semester at Sea and Pace Communications among others. My stock imagery is represented by Getty Images and DVArchive.
These days when I'm not out flying a drone or walking the dog, I’m deep into a book project and documentary film about Guatemala.
“There’s nothing easy about shooting a big book like The Splendor of Cuba - especially working for a guy like me - in a place as quirky as Cuba. Brent just got after it and got it done, beautifully.”
