May 2011

Cameron Davidson has photographed around the world, with assignments including aerials of landscapes for advertising campaigns, offshore gas platforms for annual reports and natural disasters for magazine stories. When not harnessed into the back of a turbine helicopter, he photographs people on location for a mix of ad, annual report and editorial clients. This work is from a recent assignment about a helicopter safari to the hottest place on earth, in Ethiopia, for Departures magazine. [read a Q&A with Davidson about his work]

Kevin WY Lee is a street and documentary photographer and founder of Invisible Ph t grapher Asia. Kevin is also Creative Director/Partner at SPOON, a creative studio in Singapore.

You mainly focus on documentary and street photography. Can you share with us why do you choose to specialize in these genres?
‘I like two things – the image and the story. And to me, the most personal, honest and immediate are those two genres. I don’t work on big stories or ones with an obvious social angle. I lean towards fragments, observations, and moments, so street photography appeals very much to me at the moment. I work on commercial commissions in a design/branding agency, so focusing on photography without a commercial brief is a very healthy breath of air’.

Can you tell us about some of the more interesting and satisfying projects you have worked on so far?
‘I have yet to commit myself to what I would call a ‘real’ project. I’m still searching for a story that will compel me long-term. Meanwhile, I’m collecting fragments of Singapore and Asia through my own observations and photographs. To answer your question, though, my most satisfying project experience was actually not a photography one. It was writing a feature film script a few years ago that almost got made. But having said that, every trip onto the streets is interesting, even if I return without a shot’.

What qualities do you need to be a good street photographer?
‘There are no hard rules, and there will always be exceptions, but here are a few traits that I’ve noticed:

Life Experience
Good life experience allows a photographer to connect to all walks of life and empathize with their griefs and glory. Life experiences are unique to each individual, so photographs drawn from it will be original.

Curiosity
Having child-like curiosity is important because street photography is, by nature, voyeuristic. If you’re bored with the world, you’ll be blind to her magic.

Hunger
Street photography is much like hunting. You must be hungry to go out there and hunt until you get that shot. Good hunters stalk their prey very patiently before sniping.

Good Taste
Understanding what makes a good photograph helps you execute better photographs and tell better stories. It helps with editing, too.

Invisibility
Having a certain calmness and quiet about you helps you blend in. When you’re invisible, your subjects disarm and reveal themselves.

Wit
A good sense of humor goes a long way towards spotting opportunities. Fortunately, good wit is universal.

Humility
Great street photographers are almost always humble, modest people. They brag about life, not about themselves and their work.

Can you talk about the different cameras you use for your work and discuss what cameras work best in specific situations?
‘I’ve shot with all kinds of cameras and formats but my current cameras of choice are Rangefinders. I use a Mamiya 6 for medium format and Leica M9 and M4 for 35mm. I shoot both digital and film. Digital is great, but It’s hard to ignore the beautiful, organic way film renders light, shadows and everything in-between.

‘I use a 35mm camera for most of what I photograph. I like the 3:2 frame and the 35mm resolution. A medium format camera is great for capturing photographs with a hyper sense of reality. My main reason for using these cameras are portability and handling’.

Invisible Photographer Asia (IPA) started in April 2010 as a platform for photographers in Asia to showcase their works. Can you explain the mission of IPA and also discuss your long term goals for the blog?
‘Invisible Photographer Asia was born out of a personal interest and passion for Asian photography and stories. We don’t have any mission statements. We’re a small set up, so it’s important to be flexible, fluent and organic. IPA has since grown into a pretty sizable community, so it’s rewarding to know we’re doing something right.

‘In regards to goals, we’re photographers, so we look near not far. Moving forward, we’ll continue propagating street photography and visual journalism in Asia. Our mid-term goals will be to look at ways we can grow and engage our community further, extend what we do to beyond the online platform, and most importantly, bring richer visibility to emerging Asian photographers and their work’.

What are some of the challenges and highlights in starting Invisible Photographer Asia and how did you grow the site to be as influential and popular as it is today?
‘The first challenge was content. Finding photographers, building rapport with the community, soliciting and curating the work we feature takes time and effort, especially when starting out. With growth, the other challenge is resourcing. We’re a small independent outfit, so we’re limited by our resources. IPA is currently funded by our own shallow artist pockets. We’re now officially looking for like-minded partners and sponsors.

‘The highlight in doing all this is discovering and meeting talented ‘invisible’ photographers and artists, and sharing their work with the world. It is very rewarding when we get feedback that IPA has helped some in one way or another.

‘Aside from hard work, good curation and having a unique Asian identity and focus, we have to credit the Internet and social media with how rapidly IPA has grown’.

VII photographers Antonin Kratochvil, Donald Weber and Maciek Nabrdalik have been working independently in and around the Forbidden Zone of Chernobyl, traveling into the abandoned City of Pripyat as well as its eerily overgrown green countryside. Together they have amassed one of the definitive records of the Chernobyl disaster, creating a collection of photos documenting the secret evolution of the post-atomic disaster area, pictures that reveal a haunted world. A modern city once filled with atomic engineers and nuclear physicists was lost forever to calculus error and a culture of obsolescence. Disaster happens to highly advanced societies, but what happens after the steel fences go up?

Today the photographers have found a strange society re-imagining Chernobyl. In the empty villages, postatomic pioneers hunt radioactive wild boar; the New Rich build villas equipped with Geiger-counters just a few kilometers from the destroyed reactor known locally as the “Chernobyl Riviera”; while in the weed-choked ruins closer to the epicenter, silent “Stalkers” hunt for metal salvage they can sell on the black market.

This show curated by Johan Hallberg-Campbell, is on view at VII Gallery, New York until May 31, 2011.

via Gotham Imaging, who also generously supplied handmade prints for the show.

After assisting for a small selection of cherry picked photographers and selling his scooter to a City boy, Jonathan Minster set up as a commercial photographer in London. Specialising in graphic still life tinged with humour, Jonathan has worked for a range of clients including Blackberry, The Times and Sky Sports, Dazed and Confused, Wallpaper and Vogue, creating advertising campaigns and editorial spreads alike. Jonathan’s style is of considered observations, the everyday overlooked. He creates elegant still lives that observe the unobserved and he enjoys highlighting those things that people so often overlook. Jonathan works from his studio in Old Street, London and drinks Miso soup every day. He is represented by Vue Represents.

To celebrate the launch of Not A Hipster, my new online store featuring work by emerging designers and artists, I’m giving away this print by Baldomero Fernandez. To enter, simply become a fan of Not A Hipster shop here on Facebook, and leave your name and/or website address in the comment section.

Baldomero Fernandez’s personal and commercial work blend seamlessly and his modern cinematic aesthetic is both elegant and stylized without seeming contrived. His photographs have appeared in magazines such as Vanity Fair, W and The New Yorker.

Parque Baconao
Archival Pigment Print
8 x 10 inches unframed
Signed open edition

David Welch is a fine art photographer based in Savannah, GA and Martha’s Vineyard, MA. He is currently a MFA candidate in photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Of this series, Material World, he writes, ‘My work is a response to this contemporary consumer milieu. By treating artifacts of consumer culture as readymades, I create assemblages to form pseudo monuments, or totems, that serve as precarious externalizations of culture as social biography. The totems speak of accumulation and materiality and encourage debate about consumption, media, class, gender and the ways in which we feel compelled to consume’.

via Beautiful Decay

Anders Wallace is a photographer and filmmaker originally from South Florida. He moved to New York City in 2007 to study at the School of Visual Arts. Since then he has been assisting for New York photographers while refining his own work and exploring moving video as a medium. His pictures are made rather than simply taken. They are constructed illustratively to form a filmic and often fantastical narrative using classic archetypes of Mythology to discuss identity and relationships in the de-romanticized landscape of Modernity. Wallace is looking to apply his dramatic visual style and rich conceptual subtext to the commercial worlds of Portraiture, Advertising, and Editorial pictures.

He recently won 1st place in SVA’s 5th Year Award which was sponsored by FotoCare, Gotham Imaging and Brewer-Catalmo Portfolios and judged by myself, Kris Graves, Peter Berberian, Denise Wolff and Adrian Mueller.

Louis Porter was born in the north of England in 1977 and has been based in Melbourne, Australia since 2001. His work has been exhibited in Australia, England, Canada, Austria and China. He regularly undertakes editorial commissions and has been featured in Monocle, ADbusters, GEO, Trace, The Age, The Monthly and The Big Issue amongst others.

Jonathon Kambouris was born in 1982 and raised outside Detroit, Michigan. Growing up he had a strict balance of suburban normalcy with strong roots to the inner city of downtown Detroit. He moved to New York in 2001 to study photography at Parsons The New School for Design. Since then he’s been shooting many editorial and commercial assignments, while keeping a strong emphasis on personal work. This work is from his series, ‘RX’.