After fighting wildfires in the West and touring the East Coast with his band and traveling to Guatemala to study Spanish and working on a fishing boat in Alaska, HHS Alum, Bryan Witten, works as a camera operator in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Witten graduated high school in 2001 and attended James Madison University studying public communications and political science. While in college, he continued to be an active member in his band, called the Matlock Four, which was formed in high school. After putting in a large amount of time into the band, they began to travel and perform as far north as New York City and as far west as Indiana. The band was originally formed by Whitten’s twin brother, the drummer for the band, and their catch was for every performance they dressed up as old people.

“[The original band] was called the Matlocks and we sort of co-opted the name because we wanted a nonsense, abstract thing and it just stuck,” Witten said. The members of Matlock Four eventually parted ways, some traveling as far as Berklee College of Music in Boston and others, like Whitten’s twin brother, stayed in Harrisonburg where he is still involved with various bands in the area. However, for Whitten it was a different story.

Wanting something new and a change of scenery, Witten and his girlfriend packed their bags and drove out west to the city of Reno, Nevada after graduating from JMU. Witten joined a wildfire crew where he fought wildfires for several years.

“I just wanted to do something different. I was out of school and I hadn’t been out to the West Coast before. I had a friend out there that had talked about it a little bit and just seemed like the place to go.” Whitten said. Whitten and the wildfire crew mostly spent their days working around the lake and in the desert where they would camp and spend up to 15 days out at a time.

“It was pretty intense, trial by fire so to speak. It was definitely the best job that I had ever had up to that point. I loved the hard work and the comradery of the crew. You really get to know people in those kind of situations where you are together for every hour of the day and depending on each other for your safety and for your survival,” Whitten said.

Looking back at his high school self, Whitten never thought at any point that he would be doing any of the things that he ended up pursuing.

“That was my story for many years, collecting traits as I went along, anything that kept me traveling. Seeing new things and learning new things is what I got into,” Whitten said.

Whitten’s wildfire career came to an end when he moved back to Virginia and worked an office job in Washington D.C. Whitten moved from D.C. to Richmond where he worked similar types of jobs such as playing music, working for tree removal services and even working as an assistant airplane mechanic. His stay in Richmond was cut short when he decided to follow his high school and college passion in Spanish and move to Guatemala

“I brought my guitar with me and I met other musicians pretty quickly and just fell in with a great group of people who found me a really good job teaching math and English, so I stuck around,” Whitten said.

Whitten then, once again, moved back to Virginia after spending five months in Guatemala. After being back in Virginia for only two months, Whitten continued to follow his passion of traveling and seeing new things and decided to move to Alaska.

“Maybe my dad read me too much Jack London as a kid, but for me it just seemed like another interesting place that I had never been,” Whitten said.

While in Alaska, Whitten’s interests had come full circle. In high school, he had developed an interest in the career prospects of photography and photojournalism. However, with many people in his life telling him that, at the time, this was not an actual career, Whitten decided to put these interests on hold and pursue other career prospects. Now, Whitten is a camera operator for The Northern Most Productions located in Fairbanks, Alaska.

“Family, friends and even professionals were saying that by the mid 2000’s, everybody was going to have a camera and everyone was going to be journalist, so there wouldn’t be a place for photographers,” Whitten said. “I used to think there was this gate that was really difficult to break through into the industry, but it really isn’t.”

Whitten now spends days at a time interviewing, collecting and filming footage for various assignments. This footage is then sent to different companies located in places like Los Angeles and New York City. Whitten is currently working on a documentary for a filmmaker in New York. He has traveled to remote locations like St. Lawrence island which is mainly inhabited by Alaskan natives.

Whitten’s current home, Fairbanks, Alaska, is home to about 32,000 people and has an average high temperature of 1.1 degree F and average low temperature of -16.9 degrees F in January occasionally dipping down to 50 below zero. During the winter, the sun usually rises around 10:50 am and sets around 2:40 pm making only a little less than four hours of daylight.

“It was always Fairbanks for me, it is very different from the rest of Alaska. All of Alaska is different and there are so many different places go and not anywhere is the same. Fairbanks has a lot of character, its an old pioneer town but it still has the feeling. It almost feels like the wild west in a way even though there are many thousands of people here,” Whitten said.

Many of Whitten’s neighbors live in what are called dry cabins. Dry cabins do not have running water because in Fairbanks, the water will freeze in pipes.

“There are a lot of things that remind you where you are. You can’t really ignore those things. You step outside and you never forget where you are here, you can’t go on autopilot you always have to be paying attention,” Whitten said.

Whitten is currently working on multiple documentaries as well as a pilot series about the Fairbanks Ladies of Wrestling. He is also planning to conduct a live broadcast of a rocket launch by NASA at the end of January.