From the monthly archives:
William Hundley was born in St. Paul Minnesota and studied at Southwest Texas State University. He has been part of numerous group and solo exhibitions, including 2006’s Outside In at Okay Mountain and the Predator/Prey show at Halcyon. He lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Deanna Ng is a freelance photographer specialising in documentary, portraits and off-beat travel photos. In 2006, Ng was selected as an International Participant for the Prestigious Missouri Photo Workshop by the University of Missouri. As she started photography late in her life, she believes in teaching photography to the youth. She has taught in numerous schools in Singapore and also at Objectifs: Centre for Photography and Filmmaking. Her clientele includes Ink Publishing, the Australian High Commission and the Singapore Tourism Board among others. Her photographs have also been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in Singapore. In 2008, Ng exhibited in her first international group exhibition for The Month of Photography, Tokyo.
You didn’t start out as a full-time photographer. What inspired you to make the leap?
‘I took this workshop called “Shooting Home” at Objectifs in 2004. The workshop challenged participants to find our own story in our backyard. For the workshop, I wanted to shoot Singapore as an accidental tourist. I spent a few days trying to formulate my idea but everything was thrashed by the faculty. In the end, I went down to my neighbourhood market and shot the portraits of the hawkers. I thought if I’m a tourist, I would want to see the daily lives of the locals and nothing was more real than that.
‘Through that experience, it really opened up my mind to how photography can be used as a medium to formulate ideas and tell a story. It is a channel for expressing my ideas instead of a series of pretty pictures that don’t say anything. With that, I decided to become a photographer’.
Let’s talk about your exhibition on your travel series Phsat – Siem Reap in the Month of Photography, Japan 2008. What’s the motivation behind this series?
‘Phsat – Siem Reap was taken in 2007. It’s continuation of my market series. Siem Reap is famous for Angkor Wat but I was also interested in finding out the real life of the locals behind Angkor Wat. The Phsat was an amazing avenue into the Cambodians’ daily lives. The little details of how the girl who ties her money in a plastic money and hangs it on her shirt, the muddy grounds of the market, locals going to their dentist there and when you make a turn in the market, suddenly there was a whole section of goldsmiths – all of which I did not expect to see in a market. There was just so much life in it’.
Your latest work on Hospice patients is a departure from your travel and street photography. What is the goal of this series and what have been some of the challenges you have had to overcome?
‘I was approached by Lien Foundation last April. It was the second time they were doing this campaign. For the first project, the focus was on the hospices and the care hospices provide. When they asked me to photograph for the second project, Life Before Death Campaign, the objective was to create a legacy album for hospice patients. This legacy album would be a memory for the family members. Through this album, they also wanted to get the families talking the inevitable — death.
‘When we started this project, it was the first time we were doing it. In the album, we compiled past pictures from the patient’s collection as well as my pictures. I thought it would be difficult for the families were to see how fragile their loved ones have become. As a photographer, I questioned if I was doing the right thing, too. I was worried that the family member would be sad. But at the end of the day, we did find moments of tenderness that I thought that family members would like to keep.
‘Another challenge for me was to face death. When I first started the project, I was depressed and my earlier pictures in this project reflected that. I couldn’t imagine if I was in their position. In particular, I thought of Mr Phua who was a competitive tango dancer in his retirement years and became bed ridden. He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease four years ago. However, I think the one lesson that these families have taught me is to count my blessings’.
Because you are a photography teacher, you see the work of many budding photographers. What qualities make an exceptional student with a promising career stand out from the rest?
‘As a teacher, I look out for their own personal input into their work. It’s hard to come up with an original idea since everything has been done to death but by shooting from the heart, the pictures come alive. I think this is what makes the pictures special and it is something hard to replicate’.
Photo by Andreas Weinand
Photo by Ahndraya Parlato
Photo by Amy Stein
Photo by Kelli Pennington
Photo by Nicolai Howalt
Jaimie Warren (b. Waukesha, WI, 1980) is a curator, performance artist, and photographer who makes theatrical, humorous, self-portraits in different scenarios and locations, including at parties, in her kitchen, in her car, and at the zoo. She is represented by Higher Pictures, New York, and has exhibited at White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Smith-Stewart, New York; Getsumin, Osaka; Beida University, Beijing, and Rocket Projects, Miami, among other venues. Her photography has been published in dozens of national and international publications. She currently has a solo show at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. She is also very involved in the art scene and has started the whoop dee doo project which has shows coming up worldwide.
Dutch photographer Marleen Sleeuwits studied at The Art Academy of Breda. Her work has been featured as part of numerous exhibitions, most recently at Amsterdam’s Hof and Huyser Gallery. Of her photography, she says: ‘I am researching the conceptions of time and place in my work. I want to create an image of time-placelessness, so the here and now is taken out of the photo. For example, in my last sequence, all the interiors are made inside and exclusively with artificial light, so you lose the feeling of day and night. In addition, it becomes no longer obvious as to where the space actually is. A photo of a shopping mall in Shanghai could just as easily be of a waiting room at Schiphol airport’.
University of Alabama college student Miller Mobley shoots both advertising and editorial photography. He started shooting seriously in 2006 and his personal project, Missionary Boys, was subsequently chosen for American Photography 25. Of his photography career after he graduates, he says: ‘I’m not sure where I want to go, but New York sounds great!’
Currently the Artist in Residence at Abbadia in Pays Basque, France, Philippe Herbet is represented by Camera Obscura. His work has been featured as part of recent exhibitions at Théâtre Royal de Namur and the Jacques Cerami Gallery.
Trevor Traynor studied at the University of Colorado. After graduating in 2002, he explored the globe with a Hasselblad before eventually settling in San Francisco and New York. His work has been featured in publications such as Chicago Tribune, New York magazine, Lodown magazine (Germany), and Kerb Journal (Australia). This selection of photos is from his Sandbox Series.
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The work of Austrian photographer Reiner Riedler has been published in magazines such as National Geographic, The New York Times, Newsweek, and Fortune, as well being featured in the books ‘Albanien, Leben an der Peripherie’ (Albania, Life on the Periphery), ‘Ukraine. Fotografien’ (Ukraine. Photographs), and ‘Gestürmte Festung Europa’ (The Stormed Fortress of Europe). His most recent project — Fake Holidays — is based around the theme of simulation and has been shown at Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt, amongst other places.
Angus Rowe MacPherson was born and raised in the tundra of the Canadian high arctic. He built a darkroom at eleven — commandeering one of the household bathrooms — so that he could print pictures of the world around him. He has been making pictures ever since. He moved to Toronto in 2004, where he snagged a job with a top commercial photographer. Since then, he has been shooting for advertising and entertainment clients, while also focusing on his own work. Recent projects include a study of independent wrestlers, a staged underground table tennis showdown, portraits of drag queens, and stylized explorations of banal daily life, where you’ll find at least one fake ham.
A lot of your personal work seems to require a reasonable budget. How do you go about this from a financial standpoint?
‘The simple answer is that I pay for my personal projects by shooting ads. My hard earned fees mostly get spent on personal projects. This ends up paying off in the long run: art directors get excited about personal work, which leads to more commercial work, which means I can afford to make more personal work. And so on.
‘I’ve also learned to make the most of the resources available here. Toronto is an amazing city to work out of. There is a huge industry – supported by the advertising and film work that goes on – that is really keen to participate in interesting work. People are very generous with their time and resources, which means that images can be put together pretty cheaply’.
Your documentary work is super slick. How do you approach this work and are these outtakes from shoots you are already on?
‘My documentary stuff is a mash of outtakes and independent projects. I did a really big series on independent wrestlers a couple of years ago that saw me traveling around the continent. That was a bit like a commercial project. It was heavily planned, and I had assistants and lighting as needed. This is how much of my documentary stuff works – I get interested in something, then make the images as I would with any other creative. The only difference is that they are real people and situations.
‘My other documentary work is landscapes and environments. These are often from trips I go on, as well as some outtakes from when I’m on location. In either case, I’m not nearly so controlled with these images and am really just responding to what I see out around me. Though it is only a small part of what I do. I love working like this’.
Earlier this year you were the winner of the Supercreative09 contest in which you were given access to equipment, locations, assistants, models, etc. in order to produce a conceptual project. Can you talk about this experience and how/if it has helped your career?
‘Supercreative09 was great. The guys who put it on are amazingly creative and resourceful (shout outs to Andrew Easson, Peter Dell’Agnese, Donna Irvine, and Stephen Conner). The project itself was a one that I’d had in mind for a while, but was a bit slow putting together because it was so big. Supercreative was the boost that I needed to actually commit to doing it. And it allowed me to go all the way with the concept (seven assistants, tons of gear, and the killer location were donated).
‘The big way it has helped my career is that it gave me a chance to shoot my first short. I’ve been working with a production company, and they arranged for me to get a Red on set. So, along with the camera, operator/DP Geoff Bland, and a tech guy, I was able to capture motion footage. It is still being tweaked in editing, but hopefully I’ll have something to show soon. That, along with the dozen or so stills will likely go out as a promo piece over the next month or two. A sneak peek of five images is up online now’.
You have created a separate website for the Ping Pong series that you produced with Supercreative09. Why is this?
‘The website was actually put together by the Supercreative guys as a preview of the images before I send out my promo piece. It is a bit of a teaser to keep people interested, and to pump them up for the next Supercreative – which they are running right now’. Read more about this project here.
