Author: James Jarvis

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When Jay Westcott joined ARLnow in September 2019, he said one of his main focuses was covering the arrival of Amazon’s HQ2 and its impact on the local community.

He could not have foreseen that within just seven months, he would be documenting some of the most consequential years not only for Arlington but for the entire world.

“The global pandemic changed the way we do business, shop for groceries, dine out, and live our lives here in Arlington,” he told ARLnow.

After nearly two decades in the field, Westcott is stepping away from news to focus on his other interests, including portraiture, storytelling and music. He leaves behind a vast archive of photos that captured scenes from the pandemic, major storms, Black Lives Matter protests and Arlington’s changing landscape.

The gallery above features 145 of Westcott’s favorite photos, chosen from thousands to represent his four-plus years of capturing life in Arlington.

“I have tried my best to show Arlington in all its forms and show how much I love living here,” he said.

(Updated at 2:25 p.m.) ARLnow’s staff photographer, Jay Westcott, is stepping away from the news industry — but he isn’t putting his camera aside just yet.

At 51, Westcott is shifting his focus from the fast-paced world of daily news photography to focus on the sides of photography that align with his other passions, including portraiture, storytelling and music.

“I’m looking forward to just concentrating on the things that I’m really good at,” he told ARLnow.

Growing up in Battle Creek, Michigan, roughly two hours west of Detroit, Westcott displayed a passion for photography from a young age, often using his dad’s camera to shoot yearbook pictures in high school. It wasn’t until after high school when he joined the U.S. Navy that Westcott’s passion for the visual medium began to flourish.

Four years after he joined the service when Westcott was aboard the USS Roosevelt, a Navy photographer reignited his interest in camera work.

“He had this really cool camera… and I just loved what he was able to do with that, the pictures he could get from that, and he convinced me to buy a camera,” Westcott said.

He wrote to his mother, asking her to mail his dad’s camera and bought a 35mm Canon autofocus SLR. In the years that followed, he documented life aboard the ship and the countries he visited around the Mediterranean, including Rhodes, Greece, and Venice, Italy.

Westcott, who is also a guitarist, remembers the day he decided he would leave the Navy and pursue photography. While browsing Guitar World magazine in his bunk one day, he came across a photograph by the renowned Seattle-based American photographer Charles Peterson, who was promoting his new book “Touch Me I’m Sick.”

“Instead of being one of the guys in the photos in the magazine, I wanted to be the guy taking the picture,” Westcott said.

In 1996, Westcott was honorably discharged from the Navy and headed to Virginia Beach, where he met his now ex-wife and sold cars for several years before moving to Northern Virginia.

In the summer of 2000, at age 28, Westcott enrolled at Northern Virginia Community College and then transferred a year later to George Mason University to study photography. About a year into his tenure at George Mason, and disillusioned with the program, Westcott applied and was accepted on a scholarship to The Corcoran College of Art and Design (now a part of George Washington University) in D.C.

“I went there for three years and loved every second of it,” he said.

Westcott’s first big break was a paid internship at the Scripps-Howard news service in D.C., which operated for 96 years from 1917 to 2013. What launched his career, however, was a chance sighting of of an armored truck robbery near McPherson Square Park, where he saw a man wielding a shotgun.

“So, I go out, and I take a couple of pictures and then go down to the street and take a few more pictures,” he said. “The guy gets hauled away in an ambulance while he was handcuffed.”

The pictures Westcott took that day got picked up by the Washington Post, which offered Westcott a full-time staff job shortly after.

“I felt I started at the top,” he said.

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