Jimmie Breedlove -­‐ Total One-­‐Eighty

Jimmie Breedlove -­‐ Total One-­‐Eighty

(See 3 photos at bottom)

Jimmie Breedlove can still see the scene from when he was only five and his late alcoholic father drove down a dirt and gravel road in a blue and white pickup away from the farmhouse and his family in Wisconsin.

It was the beginning of a long slide that included a brief stay at an orphanage, doing drugs as a teen and a nearly two-­‐year prison term in his early 20s.

A self-­‐described scrawny kid, Breedlove can’t remember exactly how many times he was beaten up as a child, only that he used to hide in the bathroom during recesses at school until a playground monitor showed up.

And now?

“Total 1-­‐80,” Breedlove, 38, said about the degrees of change in his life. “I’ve got a wife, kids and a passport. Life is good. I don’t have the man pressuring me.”

For a while he was working for a company that applies signs and graphics to automobiles. Then he decided he wanted to be the one who came up with content for the designs. These days the only pressure he feels is what he puts on himself while attending Salt Lake Community College’s new Center for Arts and Media, at first studying graphic design and then moving into photography.

Now he works for the SLCC campus newspaper The Globe as a photographer in the new center while working toward his Associate’s of Applied Science with an emphasis on photography.

Although he’d trade some of the wrong turns he took in life, he doesn’t shy away from talking about his past with just a hint of pride for having survived. Breedlove concluded, “If it helps the next person out.”