Jesse Feinman’s Zine ‘Surrender Gasoline’ Explores What It Means To Be a Person

‘He’s always been someone who champions the work of others – showing, curating and promoting it with care,’ Friend Editions’ founder, Oliver Shaw, says, describing Jesse Feinman in the Instagram post announcing the release of his new book, Surrender Gasoline. 

Jesse, in my eyes, is like a contemporary Tim Barber figure; someone who’s dedicated to building community through showcasing the work of those around him and around the world. With his publishing house, Pomegranate Press – which this year celebrated its tenth anniversary – he’s been able to publish the work of so many people who may not have otherwise received the light they deserve. With each book, surrounded by an air of youth, open-endedness, and a picturesque, dreamlike feel, there is a distinct quality to the photographs and stories published by Pomegranate. 

Surrender Gasoline, similarly, has that air of youth and picturesque, dreamlike feel. Comprised of photographs Jesse took over the last five years – the final years of his twenties – it’s an autobiographical account of the experiences that come along with that distinct time. Through the silence of breathtaking natural landscapes and moments with friends, Jesse’s photographs gracefully tell the familiar story of a not-so-graceful period, one full of confusion, adventure, change, and self-reflection. It truly is, as Jesse says, a collection of work he made on his journey to try to discover what it means to be a person. 

Intrigued by the project and what brought Jesse to release his own personal work when he’s so regularly behind the scenes, I sat down with him over Zoom to talk about Surrender Gasoline. 

Surrender Gasoline is out now courtesy of Friend Editions. Thank you for asking to do something about the project. 

No thank you for being down, I got hyped when I saw you put out a collection of your photographs. It’s always exciting seeing someone do something so similar to what they normally do but that’s also so different.

Thank you. I don’t know if you’re the same way, but I don’t ever want my name attached to anything. I get so weirded out seeing my full name written on anything. I feel like I always try to avoid that, so seeing someone else sharing my name a lot is a trip.

Normally being behind the scenes I feel like that would add another level to the strangeness of it all.

Yeah, and I don’t really know how I was expecting to feel. It wasn’t this grand transformative chrysalis to butterfly thing, but I think so much about belonging and possession so when I see my name written out, I’m like ‘Oh yeah, I guess that is me,’ it takes a second to register.

How was having the essay in there? There is something a lot more vulnerable about words than photographs. I’ve noticed it myself every time I make a zine of my photos, I write a two-sentence passage at the end and it always feels like the hardest thing to show people. 

There’s a literalness to words which doesn’t exist with pictures which lend themselves to interpretation. Obviously writing has a degree of interpretation but you’re using formal communication to convey an idea and with that, it feels like there’s almost more room for criticism, photography can be much more metaphorical. It didn’t feel difficult, it felt really important to have some kind of grounding mechanism to very literally explain what I was trying to do with the images. Even now I struggle talking about what I was trying to even convey with the photographs. The essay is very intense, stream of conscious, and image laden, I wanted it to to cover up what I felt like couldn’t come across in conversation. It’s answering that question of ‘What were you thinking at the time?’ The essay was an inconclusive exploration of being a person and it’s intended to read as a rapid succession of thoughts, which sort of interlocks with the photos which are of these things as they happened in real time.

The last time we spoke was at the Pomegranate show in London. A big discussion of that show was the Pomegranate universe. Looking at your personal work it encapsulates that open-endedly beautiful universe you created with Pomegranate so well.

When I was making these photographs, I wasn’t trying to extrapolate any meaning out of them. When I started to spend some time with them, that was when I tried to ask myself the question of ‘What has all this meant?’ It was nice to see how they lend themselves to the sensibility for my curatorial practice. I made a lot of it when I wasn’t being a very gentle or kind person, so it’s interesting talking about the honesty of the photographs. I did try my best to not use anything that didn’t feel honest or sincere despite strenuous or upsetting exterior circumstances of what I was feeling. I made these pictures over a five-year period and my life looks so different now from when I started taking these photos, I wanted to adhere to the personal responsibility that sometimes accompanies that and sort of see if there was any throughline.

Did you find that throughline going back through the images?

I didn’t start going back through the archive until I was in England in August. I had a few nights alone in a hotel room, I was in a country I had never been in, and I had made a couple of pictures on a trip out to the sea with some friends. It didn’t reinvigorate anything in me but I felt like I had a lot of time to think, in what felt like the first time in quite a while. In 2025 the memory card is a very literal gateway to moments you may not have thought about, looked at, or considered in a long time. I started sifting to see if there was anything that felt lyrical that I completely forgot about. A couple days into it I told myself I had found something.

What was that something?

So many things had happened, I had met and spent time with so many people. Maybe it was as good of a time as ever to start to see the links there. It became this thing where I realised maybe there is something here, and sort of from an egotistical perspective after I spent more time with the photos I sent the file to Oliver at Friend, and asked him if there was anything in there. He was like ‘Yes, a hundred percent, there is this beautiful personal narrative happening here.’ That was it. It was very simple. Coming from a publishing perspective I know how to make these objects, so we got to circumvent a lot of the difficult, frustrating, and more empirical aspects of production. It was this experiment that forced me to visit things, reconsider them and sort of let them be repopulated. What I think I’m always shooting for is something resembling what it means to be a person, occupy physical space, and different spaces. For me this was an opportunity for me to give a little bit of context into what all these personal relationships have meant to me but also keep it vague enough so anyone looking at them can find something in them.

What does it mean to be a person?

Well obviously, the discretion surrounding consciousness isn’t something that will ever be solidified in a photo zine but what being a person for me has been this very imperfect and ungraceful meandering. It has felt very aimless, very endless, and as I’ve gotten older what I’ve tried to learn is how to not walk with a different pace of steps but maybe understand that so much of what we do has to come with forgiveness for oneself. 

To me a lot of these images are not about a quest to love myself, to love my friends or love my life, it's more to finally look at my life through a lens of forgiveness and beauty rather than a lens of second guessing, uncertainty, unfamiliarity. Being a person is being on a really long walk and finding a way to accept that you’re probably going to trip over a lot of different stuff and that you have to not beat yourself to death over not doing everything the best way imaginable.

Did you find that putting the images together wraps up a chapter and allows you to give that forgiveness to yourself? Was there a degree of catharsis there?

No, of course not. It’s never cathartic, there’s no relief, I’m not even saying that to be a hard ass. I don’t think there was a beautiful realisation that came at the end of it. Everything I do is about the search rather than about the finding of it. What I’m hoping will come later is a deeper appreciation for what happened, I made a lot of these images in a lot of different places with a lot of people, some I didn’t see for years after, there’s always going to be some complicated residual feelings that come alongside that and maybe in a way I was trying to pretend the complications or whatever didn’t happen but there is an ease to it. 

How did it come up for you to reach out to Oliver with the zine?

He is my right hand man in publishing. We talk a lot and have worked together on a lot of projects. We have a lot of similar sensibilities, both putting out work that is a bit more ephemeral and typically tends to be more personal narrative leaning. So much of what I do is bridging and understanding and I felt that Ollie had a good understanding of what I was trying to do. The most important thing to me is that I work as an editor and publisher so I work with a lot of images. The thing that I’m most happy with about this work is that it feels like a zine, when I think about the cultural traditions of zine making, specifically photos this feels really in line with that. He understood immediately that we didn’t have to reach for anything that we didn’t need to. At the end of the day, I was trying to find something that felt honest, sincere and a little bit unbuttoned. I was stoked that he was surprised that it was “good”. It's nice to sort of prove something.

Totally, and there’s something that fits in with what he does as a publisher to publish it with Friend Editions. Did you edit the zine?

I put together something that in my mind was pretty rough, I sent it to Ollie and told him to change whatever he wanted. I think he made three or four changes, and I was like fuck it.

It’s like the classic scenario of you think what you’ve done is wrong then someone else looks at it and is like that looks fine.

I tried pretty hard to not be too precious with it, there are a few pairings that naturally made sense, there are some that I don’t love but whatever I think it’s for the best if some aren’t good.

You spend so much time working with and curating other people’s images, how was it working with your own images?

I definitely critiqued them harder. That’s part of why I wanted to bring someone else in once the idea hatched to make it because I felt that I couldn’t look at my pictures with the same degree of openness as I could other people. It became a bit challenging to decipher what felt “worthy”. I trusted my judgement with my own images way less than I do when I judge someone else’s.

Yeah, it’s just being your own harshest critic.

Totally, but also trying to take a step back and try to look at it from a holistic perspective rather than a fine art perspective. It’s my life and I don’t want to be like, ‘My life looks bad’.

How did the title, Surrender Gasoline arise? 

I wanted the title to seem crazy. It's sort of destabilising and takes someone out of their patterns of expectations when thinking about a book. 

When did the title come into your mind?

I have the word “mercy” tattooed on me, the concepts of mercy and surrender are things I’m always thinking about. I was originally going to call it “Surrender Wings”, but I thought it would be interesting and funny to take away anything resembling poetics. I don’t ever put too much weight into a name but when I thought of the word “Gasoline” from a phonetic perspective it was something destabilising that left a lot of room for uncertainty and discovery. 

The end goal was for it to feel intensely personal and very revealing. If I had to describe the project and what making it was like it was to allow all of what's happened to be revealed, no secrets, no surprises, alright here it is. I’ve used work in the last amount of years as a coping mechanism to deal with some of my experiences. This was sort of using my work, to not use it but more so show it instead. It’s going back into reading shit you wrote when you were a kid there is something alarming about it. The last two or three years I’ve felt really unself assured and it’s been the hardest I’ve been on myself. It’s been the biggest period of self-laceration and self-cruelty. This isn't me trying to close this chapter but me trying to salvage something that is suggestive of there being more. That’s why the essay is the most important part which is kind of ironic.

At the same time those are the feelings that come with change.

Yeah, I’m thirty now, I don’t know what I thought that was going to look or feel like, but it is really different.

When you’re a teenager you think that thirty is crazy and now, you’re here.

Yeah, it’s not an attempt to hold on to youth or fleetingness, it's more if anything the opposite. A book has to end and it’s over. 

There are limited copies. How do you feel about the ephemerality of it?

For me the victory lap was the creation of the thing, it’s not meant to travel the world, go on tour, and be in every bookshop. It’s just this thing that happened and if we need to make copies in a few months fuck it we can make some more. For now, let it do its thing, let it be gone, let people enjoy it. I feel good.