Jason Chatfield - Vintage Portrait of the Week
And his side kick Ginger Meggs also came and played
Way back in 2013, I kicked off a Portrait Of The Week challenge*… I didn’t stick to it much, BUT I did get a few in, and let’s revisit one of my faves with this throwback to cartoonist Jason Chatfield.
The quick story is that I met Jason at a bar at a comedy gig, he wasn’t on stage that night, but he was doing stand-up as well as cartooning. Most of his cartooning was drawing a little strip called Ginger Meggs. Jason was the 5th artist to be Ginger’s father after it was passed onto him when he was only 23.
Jason kept up Ginger from 2007 to 2022, which is when the print media world ended Ginger’s 101-year, 9-month run.
I haven’t seen Jason in years, and I blame him for that as he moved to New York and started getting his work published in such rags as The New Yorker, Variety and even Mad Magazine. He’s even got a great book about to come out called “You’re Not A Real Dog Owner Until…” Go have a read of some sample pages and pre-order here.
You can follow Jason on his Substacks by clicking →
ANYWAYS… onto these images.
I wanted to work out a way of including Jason and Ginger in the same picture. When I arrived at Jason’s place, I thought we could write on some glass. The problem was we were 3 stories up and I couldn’t get outside the windows. THEN I saw the bathroom, and the light was good, so the shower screen was our new canvas.
And once we had Ginger in place, I had to work on getting Jason into the shot. I did try using some off-camera flash, but the space was too small, and it killed the whole look of the shot. So I got in the bath and shot with the window behind me… the only time I’ve been in a tub with someone nearing 100 years old.
It worked out okay, but the low light meant I couldn’t get both in focus. Ginger in focus worked well, as did the other image, which is at the top, backlighting both Jason and Ginger using the triangle window to centralise the composition. The exposure was based on the sky. I wanted that to still hold detail, and the light to give some pops of colour.
What do I think of it in 2025? I wish I had Jason turned around the other way so he was looking at Ginger, there is a body language symbolism there i’m not sure I like… but it could also be that while Ginger is behind Jason, Jason is happy moving forward to all the great things he has achieved since this image was taken.
You can check out Jason’s magnificent substacks at
You can visit the original blog post of this shoot here.
*Portrait Of The Week is alive and well this year, you can check it out over at photobat.net
I had so much fun doing this shoot. Thank you for sharing this throwback, Bat! You’re the best.