Just figured out what it was. In the ContactInfo class there was a simple accessor function to get the encodedData.
public String getPhoto() {
return m_photo.getEncodedPhoto();
}
By simple putting it on ignore (or simply change it to return the object itself, which I might do),
@JsonIgnore
public String getPhoto() {
return m_photo.getEncodedPhoto();
}
The serializer stopped trying to read from it. I wish there was a way to set the serializer engine to be more "explicit declaration" for properties instead of "serialize everything that seems to match the member variables."