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PHOTOGRILL: Tell us about your photography in general.

PHOTOGRAPHER: I have been working as a professional photographer approaching two decades. I laid the foundations of my career as a press photographer in regional Victoria before graduating to hold staff positions for the Melbourne Herald Sun, The Age and Sunday Age. I will always have an enormous respect for newspaper photographers. Their ability to think, react, adapt and produce high quality images in constantly changing environments is astounding.

That said, after 13 years in the industry I felt my journey had stalled and the time seek new adventures. I moved into the freelance market in 2005 with a view to find a new audience for my work and discover myself creatively. The theme of my work would be best described as environmental portraiture. I contribute images to magazines, design agencies and corporate clients.

For lack of a better word, I would describe my work as minimalist. I adopt a less is more approach to my work and aim for controlled simplicity. Traditionally Melbourne based, I relocated to Byron Bay in Northern New South Wales January of 2011.

PHOTOGRILL: Can you tell us about your personal projects and your iPhone photography?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Working on a freelance basis I have found time and a new zest for personal projects. I have four ongoing projects. The first being what is commonly termed lomography – working with toy analogue cameras. I started the project using a Holga 120GN, more recently falling for the marriage of a Lubitel 166 and Fuji Velvia 50.

The second I have simply titled, blue, blue, blue. Working with a digital SLR and a 50mm lens. Primarily working at dusk and looking at all shades of blue. The third, I have called, the fallen. Again working with digital SLR, a 50mm lens and looking at objects that are out of place or have no relation to their landscape.

The final and most recent is a collection of images captured using an iPhone. I confess to initially being skeptical of camera phones, primarily the quality restraints attached to working with a file 984pxl’s by 984pxl’s. Putting my own prejudices asides I began to the use iPhone to create a visual diary of reference material and observations.

I appreciate the playful nature and polaroid like processing of the application. Albeit on the lighter of side of the spectrum I believe that every photograph is an insight in the thinking and aesthetics of the photographer.

PHOTOGRILL: Can you tell us about your thought processes while making these images?

PHOTOGRAPHER: At risk of sounding self indulgent, the images are a collection of very personal, ‘wow, look at that’ moments, quirky observations within the landscape and reference material that I have photographed using the iPhone. Like all of my personal projects, my iPhone images are an extension of what I have always found fascinating about photography. I see a photograph as a record of an observation, an observation that is unique to an individual. I use the iPhone to document and share these observations.

Through my personal projects I have trained myself to look at the world from a child like perspective. Taking time to study colour, form and never hesitating to photograph a subject on the basis that it appeals to my senses. It is very personal – I would not necessarily describe it as art rather an insight into my view of the world around me. For similar reasons that I use toy cameras for my personal work, I believe that a beautiful image is a beautiful image, regardless of the value of the camera from which it was recorded.

PHOTOGRILL: What is different, about your iPhone photography compared to your commercial work?

PHOTOGRAPHER: The reality of commercial and commissioned work is that you are often a slave to the boundaries set by an art director – there is little room to move. I’m not suggesting that commercial tasks are not both challenging and rewarding, nor do I want to discount the value of quality technology that is available to photographers.

That said as I mentioned earlier I believe there is room for light and shade within photography. The iPhone is the perfect shade of light, simple images captured using a simple tool without a great deal of thought – a deliberate step away from the precise. I also like the non-intrusive nature of simple equipment.

PHOTOGRILL: Do you use any iPhone post processing?

PHOTOGRAPHER: I use an application called hipstamatic, which has a nice old school, polaroid feel. I find it fitting as I use my iPhone in a similar vein to the polaroid. I do very little on the production/photoshop theme as I like the, not quite right quality. It is not intended to be precise. Social media is the perfect vehicle for iPhone images, an instant form of visual communication. I have never had the desire to print files, maybe in time this will change and I’ll print images on a small scale, drink coasters perhaps.

PHOTOGRILL: What’s life like as a photographer in Byron Bay?

PHOTOGRAPHER: There is no denying that Byron is a very creative, arts friendly and accepting community. I find it interesting that creative types flock to Byron to find their way. I think that realistically you need to have some sense of direction and a reasonable foundation from which to establish yourself in a small community, as opportunities are limited.

Byron has a very transient population, I am told that one should not consider themselves local until their mail has carried the 2481 postcode for 25 years. I hope to stay so I have another 24 years and 6 months to discover if I fit right in.

PHOTOGRILL: I normally ask for the technical details, exposure, ISO, etc. Instead I’ll ask do you prefer iPhone 3 or 4?

PHOTOGRAPHER: I am an old fashioned iPhone 3 user. I am not the most technology savvy person walking the planet. I use my iPhone to make calls, check the occasional email and to take pictures.

PHOTOGRILL: Any funny or interesting stories about your time as a photographer?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Nothing specifically amusing attached to my iPhone. Telephones are generally not all that amusing.

Perhaps my most embarrassing professional moment is some years ago, during the early days of my newspaper career. I was sent to photograph Stevie Wonder at the Channel 9 studios in Richmond and you guessed it, I said, “Mr Wonder could you please look this way”. His response was to continue talking so that he could follow the direction of my voice.

PHOTOGRILL: Why do you make photos, what drives you?

PHOTOGRAPHER: That’s a good question and a difficult one to answer. Photography is what I have always done. I find it incredibly fulfilling to photographing a subject and walk away believing that in that moment I got it right. As a photographer I find that my style is constantly evolving, I look at images that I took five years ago and I can tear them to shreds. The picture that I took today may not be nearly as rewarding tomorrow. Styles, trends and expectations are constantly changing the way I approach my own work.

I am a visual person. I have a bad habit of constantly analyzing images. I watch films, paying close attention to lighting, composition and lens selection at the expense of the dialogue. I don’t see myself as the most creative person on the planet. There are many photographers past and present who I admire that have a visual gift that is well beyond my reach. That said, I believe I have a reasonable appreciation of light, composition and the mechanics of a camera. Approaching 20 years in the industry I perhaps enjoy photography more now than at the beginning of my career. Over time I have developed an understanding of my own strengths and weaknesses, somewhere between the two sits my style and body of work.

a a This entry was posted on Saturday, August 6th, 2011 at 10:02 pm. It is filed under The Grill and tagged with Creative Photography, iPhone Photo, Landscape Photography, Photographic Techniques, Photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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PHOTOGRILL: Why did you create a merged image for this shot?

PHOTOGRAPGER: I did that image as a join-up because I didn’t have a lens wide enough to do it in one shot. I often do join-ups of the ceremony when I’m at the front. I use the photoshop’s ‘photomerge’ feature to stich it together but given how close I was to the couple, and I had to shoot the component images with a wide angle lens, I decided to join them manually using layer masks to dictate the composition. Given there was a lot of overlap I was able to choose to use the bridesmaid or particular groomsman from one image or another. I intentionally kept the odd shape because I think the collage feel works really well for this sort of image. It is the in many ways the key moment of a wedding and a wide photo of the ceremony more often than not ends up a double page spread in an album.

PHOTOGRILL: Do you generally rely on post-production in your photography?

PHOTOGRAPGER: When I shoot weddings I tend to work very instinctively and try not to preconceive too much, even my posed shots tend to be very spur of the moment in finding locations and how I pose the couple. With my post production it tends to be horses for courses. I love overlaying textures on images but I don’t do it on all weddings and the more weddings I’m shooting the more subtle my retouching is becoming.

PHOTOGRILL: How did you meet the young couple to be wed?

PHOTOGRAPGER: They were a referral. I had photographed the wedding for a work colleague of the bride, Jodi. Aaron and Jodi’s wedding was just a lovely day. They both come from strong, close families and are passionate about the ocean. Jodi is a marine biologist and Aaron a passionate surfer, they live on the Mornington Peninsula. At the end of the night Jodi, who had never played a musical instrument, played a song for Aaron she had been learning in secret before the wedding. She struggled to get through it with tears flowing from her eyes but it was incredibly moving and I felt like a fool crying like a baby as I
bid them farewell at the end of the night.

PHOTOGRILL: Tell us about your career & how you became a wedding photographer.

PHOTOGRAPGER: I’ve been a professional photographer for over 20 years. I started as a cadet on the suburban newspaper The Melbourne Times, which came about because my projected career of rock stardom wasn’t quite working out as I’d hoped. I’d seen an ad in the paper for a cadet photographer and literally bull-dusted my way into the job, I was asked at the interview “do you have an SLR camera?” I didn’t even know what a SLR camera was but I said yes.

18 months after I’d started Id won cadet photographer of the year in one of the national press photography awards and runner up in the other so I knew I’d found my calling.

I then went on to work for The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and other Fairfax titles on a freelance basis for many years as well as other clients. Through my passion for fine wine I fell into food and wine photography which took me around the country and saw me nominated in the World Food Media Awards in their top photographer in both drink and food category in 2003.

I started to look at wedding photography after I’d become a full time parent to two sons, and found running a studio incompatible with demands on me. I’d come across a young American couple who had a wedding photography business called ‘The Image is Found’, Their work blew me away, along with some other American photographers including Ben Chrisman and Anna Kuperberg

PHOTOGRILL: What other interesting weddings have you photographed?

PHOTOGRAPGER: I’ve been lucky enough to photograph weddings all around the world including a 5 day wedding celebration in Mauritius. The bride’s father was a very prominent mauritian and the wedding had had been well reported in the local media. During the first of the ceremonies the family house was burgled of around $250,000 worth of goods including many expensive gifts meant for the couple. The following night there was a party at the house and many of the guests were visibly devastated. The thieves were later caught but unfortunately little of the stolen goods recovered.

PHOTOGRILL: What attracts you to wedding photography?

PHOTOGRAPGER: I’m attracted to wedding photography because it suits my photojournalistic skill set.
It allows me great flexibility in how I shoot which means I’m not as intrusive with couple constantly asking them to do this or that for me. I also love that I give people a family heirloom, something meaningful that will gain interest with the passing generations of their family. I have made some good friends from shooting weddings too.

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a a This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 at 9:00 pm. It is filed under The Grill and tagged with Creative Photography, People, Photographic Techniques, Photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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For years now photographer Katherine Newbegin has travelled the world and photographing inside empty buildings. Newbegin lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, but in 2008 she received a DAAD fellowship to live in Berlin, where she had been visiting and working over the years.

PHOTOGRILL: Please tell us about your photography in general.

PHOTOGRAPHER: My work is combination of the experience of wandering, of allowing myself to be carried to the locations, and being open to that moment of recognising what is home. For me, breaking into spaces and exploring the traces of what has been left behind feeds my insatiable curiosity about these places and the people who occupied them. My hope is that the photographs create a stage for a story to be told, for the viewer to examine the remainders and piece together something that echoes within their own history. The work is deeply informed by the human relationships that took place in these spaces, but now only remain in the evidence left behind. The lingering floor patterns, ancient mattresses, and bedside tables act as a conduit into a displaced time. Initially, the interest in these spaces is of a visual nature and not a political one, or one related to changes taking place in that society – then as I learn more about these countries, it takes on a bit of a societal interest, but primarily it is visual.

PHOTOGRILL: What was it about Cambodia that attracted you?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Cambodia and Vietnam held a real fascination for me – the architecture is influenced by a 1970?s soviet feel. I had always wanted to travel to Vietnam because of the history of the Vietnam War, and the Khmer Rouge, which I had researched some during college. At the time, I was living in Berlin and preparing for a show there in the Spring. I was thinking a great deal about the context of where and how the work was shown. On top of that, the Berlin winter was dark and brutal. I had never been to South East Asia before, so I did not really know what to expect. I thought it might be a little like Mexico, but I was surprised by how completely different it felt. One of the things I loved in Cambodia was visiting Sihanoukville – I went there to find an abandon train station. While I was photographing, this cow kept entering the shot. People actually lived in the train station, and finally a little boy helped keep the cow out of the shot.

PHOTOGRILL: What was it like working in Cambodia?

PHOTOGRAPHER: My process is very much about wandering and discovering and allowing the photographs to shape themselves. There is a book by Rebecca Solnitt, called A Field Guide to Getting Lost. In it she talks about the colour spectrum and the blues we cannot see, almost like the residue of a hidden world. Cambodia felt like it held secrets, long passageways that led only to emptiness.

I did not have a specific agenda in mind when I started shooting in Cambodia. I found a local hotel magazine guide and I took a taxi from one hotel to the next. The most daunting obstacle was receiving the permission of the hotel manager to photograph, but usually I paid to rent the room and then it was no problem, since I was a customer. Cambodia was relatively easy to work in, since they are very accustom to tourism, incredibly kind, and most people spoke English.

PHOTOGRILL: I?d like to get a sense of what you look for in a building?

PHOTOGRAPHER: This is a great question, most of the time I travel alone and my process occasionally involves illicit activities like breaking into places, throwing rocks threw windows, or giving people a bribe for letting me into spaces while their manager is away. Once I do find the actual space I want to capture, then I think it is an indescribable feeling of being pulled towards something.

With Phnom Penh Discotheque, the building was near a hotel that I was looking at photographing. The truth is my boyfriend saw the building first, I was making a phone call in the lot right in front of the building. While I was doing this, he walked in and looked at the first floor, then he came back to get me knowing that I would love it. The building itself, was not that interesting from the outside, but once I entered, it had this feeling of history, and traces of people having passed through it, which is crucial to my work.

I am not sure how to describe when I?m certain I need to photograph a space, other than that there is something I recognise in it, something that feels like home. I also completely fell in love with the patterned floors. The light was this perfect afternoon light and it seemed to completely set some of the rooms aglow. The space was both abandoned upstairs and in use downstairs as a discotheque, a dichotomy which I found engaging – this very old royal house was being taken over by kids and used as a party scene at night.

PHOTOGRILL: How did you work once you were inside the building?

PHOTOGRAPHER: When I am shooting I don?t feel that I engage my analytical mind at all, it just becomes a pure experience of seeing. I remember feeling safe since I was not alone, and this gave me the freedom to relax and take my time, which is why I think these images turned out so well. I think I only made slight variations on a specific idea, well two ideas – one is to capture the space as a whole and the second is to then to move closer in and reveal the traces.

I always use the same equipment, which is a Pentax 6 x 7 and my tripod. I use the Pentax because it is small enough for me to carry in a backpack and large enough for me to print 30 x 40 inches or larger. It is a great camera when I am in rushed circumstances because it is roll film and it goes quickly. I do remember several times in this building, packing all my gear up and then realizing I had found another shot and unpacking everything again. The architecture here seemed to engage me for a disproportionate amount of time, I recall being surprised by how long I stayed there shooting. I shot this on film, in natural daylight, and the only real technical aspect were the long exposures, two minutes or more for most of the shots.

This was a very prolific day for me, I just loved this building. The shoot took almost five hours, and I think it was at least 150 images, but all from this same building. In the entire trip, I took around 1000 shots, and in total I probably photographed twenty buildings.

PHOTOGRILL: What do the Cambodian people think of you photographing their old buildings?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Most of the time, people are usually a bit uninterested about the work I do in their buildings. In this particular situation with the discotheque, the guard did not seem to care. I later found out, from someone who came to see the exhibition in Berlin and recognized the space, that this particular building had also been used to exhibit contemporary art for a celebration. In Cambodia, the children were very fascinated by my camera equipment.

Most recently, in India it was very difficult to get the permission to photograph the cinemas, because people were suspicious of me. The people of India were very curious about what I was doing, where I was from, and what my work was like. Usually, I had anywhere from ten to thirty people watching me work while I shot the cinemas. There was a real indescribable warmth in India.

PHOTOGRILL: Is post processing important to your work?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Yes, the post process is very important to my work, but I am a traditional darkroom printer, so it is different. I have to strike a delicate balance of not being too close to the work by allowing myself distance after I make the photographs. But also I must not lose interest in the work by doing too much darkroom time and getting burned out. With this particular project, I printed my own contact sheets in New York and then I flew straight back to Berlin where I was suppose to be living full time for my DAAD fellowship. I had broken the rules a bit by sneaking off to Cambodia to make the new work, but at that point, Berlin was so dark and depressing I was ready to jump off a bridge.

Then once I was back in Berlin I sorted through all of these images on the computer (because there was no money to print them) and repeatedly narrowed it down. Finally, I had about 30 images printed into tests in order to edit for the exhibition and I chose which ones would become the final 30 x 40 inch prints. For me, this in depth editing of the work was brutal and just as important as the shooting of the work. This is the part of how I essentially decide what the story is I want to tell.

PHOTOGRILL: How has your photography career progressed?

PHOTOGRAPHER: I received an MFA in Photography from Hunter College in 2005 and BA in 1999 from Yale University where I studied English and Photography. During my studies I worked with Reiner Leist, Lois Conner, and Todd Papageorge. In the Spring of 2001, I moved to New York City, where I have been living and working ever since. In 2008 I received a DAAD fellowship to live in Berlin, where I had been photographing in Eastern Europe, off and on, for years.

While living in Berlin, Revolver published a two-person catalogue of my work. I have been showing my work at various galleries and institutions in both Europe and the US, including: Dina4Projekte, Haas & Fischer Gallery, Galerie Open, Pinakothek der Moderne, Kunstverein Munich, and the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.

For the past five years, I have worked on a project photographing old Soviet hotel rooms, in countries such as Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Cuba, Moldova, and Eastern Germany. In December 2009, I received a fellowship from the Tiffany Foundation, which allowed me to travel to India where I photographed old Cinemas.

This past spring, I had my first museum show at the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, where I was invited, along with Tina Barney and Tim Davis, to photograph the campus over the course of one year.

PHOTOGRILL: Is there anything I should’ve asked?

PHOTOGRAPHER: For some reason this question made me think of my first photograph from when I was thirteen. I remember constructing a scene with no people in it. I photographed an old chair in my house with the back door open and the reflection of the daylight on the intricate wood of the chair. It is an image that still resonates with me and seems to hold everything I look for now a sense of isolation and emptiness, the lack of people but in a way it is a stage waiting for people, the traces of history, the architecture and the domestic background.

The other thing I should also mention is a recent collobaration with ArtStar.com, where I have a couple of images from my work photographing cinemas in India. What I love about ArtStar is that they are making my work available to everyone, because it is very affordable. I like to think of having these images from India in house in Portland, Oregon or an apartment in New York City. I have also been really amazed with how much support and exposure they have provided for me as an emerging artist. They are working with some fantastic artists in both their main site and with littlecollector.com – eventually the website will be launched in 5 languages. And not to leave out the fact that they are just really fantastic people.

a a This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 8:10 am. It is filed under The Grill and tagged with Creative Photography, Photographic Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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