Loves Category

Despite her clinical introduction to photography—fulfilling an arts credit requirement in high school—20 year-old Samantha McKee‘s approach to her craft is filled with passion, experimentation and playfulness.

I went into the class with nothing special in mind except for the need to acquire a passing grade. But once I started with photography, I never wanted to put down the camera. There was something special about capturing a specific moment in time that moved me and made me pursue the craft. My basic need to pass the high school course was overridden with a much higher need to capture a little bit of the world and pin it down.

The Seattle native is studying at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where the visages she’s met with each day outweigh her fascination with capturing people in intimate portraits.

The place I live always affects the pictures I take. When I am at home in Seattle, I tend to take lots of photos of people and animals. But when I am away at school in Scotland, I love to take photos of the landscape. The history behind every little piece of building or sloping hills is so significant that I can’t help but snap away at them. I love taking photos of landscape and animals because you get to see the beauty of the world printed out for you and you get to hold onto that forever.

The story of photographer Alana Paterson‘s childhood is one that is just as engrossing as the works she produces as a result of it. The current resident of Portland, Oregon grew up on a small island off the west coast of Canada with her immediate family—and no-one else. Her connectedness to her environment is evident in the picturesque portraits and landscapes she captures, and her camera rarely ventures indoors.

“Where I’m from plays a huge role in how and what I communicate as it does for everyone; whether you’re from the jungle or the desert,” she tells us. “As someone from the pacific north west has an affinity to natural spaces, I’m from the western gulf islands so from day one it’s all I’ve known.”

A graduate of both Emily Carr and Lesley Universities, Alana’s work is like a visual journal, intimately documenting the places she goes and the people she meets, with little of her experiences left out.

“A lot of my life is present [in my work],” Alana explains, “The only parts missing are the boring bits, like updating websites and emailing clients, being stuck in traffic. Also the ones that are just too beautiful or meaningful to catch on film. They exist and it’s hard for me—and I would guess other photographers of the same genre have the same problem—to let go of some things I see, not always being frantic to get an image or spoil a beautiful moment with a camera. I’m learning that you can’t capture it all and to be okay with that.

“My favorite things to shoot are people I love—as cheesy as that sounds. I like to shoot the little idiosyncrasies that make up who they are, the little things you can’t notice about a person untill you have spent a lot of time with them.”

Currently, Alana is working on a long-term project that she’s been working on for the past three years: a series on the organic farm where she spends her summers working. While it often means her career as a photographer is put on hold while she’s immersed in this world, it enables her to actively pursue something that makes up so much of her life.

“It can be really hard being out there knowing I’d have way more photographic work if I was living in Vancouver or able to travel more. But it’s also a really great job I’m lucky to have and growing is something I’m passionate about. I guess that project is where the two halves of my life can meet.”

Nineteen year-old science student Sabrina Melanson has amassed, in the two years since she first picked up a digital camera, a huge following online of people appreciating her specific and prolific look into what it means to be a teenage girl today. Montreal-based Sabrina’s milky white skin features in many of her images, as do signifiers of ballet, flowers, animals and other ideas surrounding traditional feminine energy. For Sabrina, photographing herself and the world around her is her way of sharing her single view on both of these things.

“I started [making pictures] because I was tired of the way the people around me viewed the world,” she explained to us. “I wanted to try to change their perspective, bring light to the small little treasures in life. With my camera, I was able to do that.

“My favorite person to take pictures of is myself. That sounds so bad, but I deal with social anxiety and I feel most calm when I’m alone. I also find it a whole lot easier to take pictures of my ideas for they are clear in my mind.”

Sydney-based photographer Sarah Louise Adamson‘s work is tied inherently to the human condition, having been initiated as the result of a negative side of humanity and existing as a way to explore it.

“I never had a huge passion at a young age for photography, film or any of that,” she told us, “I transferred from beginner’s French to art late in high school because the teacher was a mad creep so maybe that helped a bit. I think it is more my interest in people and capturing them that is more my fascination rather than the art itself.”

The 24-year-old, who is also a graphic designer and musician, has busied herself exploring the nature of people and how we exist both alone and with each other. Her ongoing series ‘Let Them Smoke’, particularly, is a response to what it means to live in the contemporary world.

“[It] began as I was thinking about all the disasters, man made and natural, that were going on. It seems every second week there was something major going on. As I kept thinking about it, and as I was reading the bible, the idea was clear to me that humanity is so fragile, and that our fragility doesn’t change. I think that I was only aware of our human condition when it was magnified through a disaster but I guess I wanted to explore that at any moment anything could happen. That idea could then make us reflect on the way that we view ourselves, that perhaps we aren’t as in control of our lives as we thought.”

It was from visiting tourist spots while living in San Francisco that New York-based photographer Justin James King came to create And Still We Gather With Infinite Momentum, a series that depicts tourists visiting great sights on the west coast, which have been blacked out from the images, so all that is left is their experiences encountering nothingness.

“I’ve always been interested in the way people move through and around a given space,” King—who arrived at photography after using the medium to capture the sculpture work he was creating at the time—told us, “I used to visit heavily touristed spots around San Francisco, watching the way people gathered at certain designated “scenic viewing areas.” I would watch the way they all wanted to stand in the same spots and sometimes there would be subtle competition to get to those perfect viewing angles–not dissimilar to finding the “best” seat in a movie theater.

“I started thinking about how different their experiences must be from each other, both personally and culturally. I tried to imagine what they might be seeing (and thinking), and thought about what I was seeing too as I looked out at the same landscapes. My conclusion was that I didn’t “see” the landscape at all, but what I did see was solely an interpretation and a projection of that interpretation. The possibilities seemed infinite. If the way we see and understand the world is shaped by our individual experience then it is impossible to truly see the landscape without the filter of culture and history.”

When it comes to his influences, King cites Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as one of his earliest connections with film as a relative of photography. The film, he tells us, made him “simultaneously aware of both the limitations and the possibilities in a frame of film. Scenes where the director allowed the image to get completely out of focus and abstract—just light and shadow—are still very memorable.”

Another driving force behind his work is controversial Australian photographer Bill Henson, who selected King’s work for an exhibition called ‘Capture the Fade’ at Sydney’s Paper Mill Gallery in late 2010.

“I was honored when Bill Henson selected my work for the ‘Capture The Fade’ show. He’s someone whose work consciously uses space to allow for possibilities. It’s those possibilities that make some viewers uncomfortable with his work, because whatever they decide to see and project about themselves and the world influences their interpretation. I wouldn’t say he’s a direct influence, but his ability to allow for self-projection and a sense of mystery is something I hope to have in my own work.”

The photographs of 21-year-old Romke Hoogwaerts document his travels around the world and the people and places he’s fallen in love with along the way. A resident of Queens, New York, Romke has channelled his love of photography into MOSSLESS, the blog-cum-magazine that profiles and gives exposure to other new and emerging image-makers, of which he is the editor.

You can purchase a parcel of MOSSLESS wonder here, and read on for our interview with its founder.

PORTABLE: What’s your favorite thing about being a photographer?
Romke: The best thing about being a photographer is taking pictures of people. It’s just really fun. I want to take more pictures of people, just people on the street and my friends. I’m making it sound like I enjoy it as a prop for social interaction, but I think it’s more than that. I really desire the looking back at those pictures in later years.

What is your favorite format to shoot on?
I love to shoot most on a small 35mm film camera, but I regretfully haven’t had one that isn’t automatic in a while. I like shooting in black and white 800 or faster film, 100 if it’s sunny. I like to be in control, I want to be able to distinguish what is happening in the photo, but I don’t like crystal clarity. The grain of faster film and the slight blurs of shooting at a 1/30th of a second remind me that the photo is just that.

What does the apparent demise of film mean to you?
To be honest I don’t feel that terrible about it. We will feel the same disappointment with losing digital photography to the next thing that comes along, as we did when photography killed naturalistic painting. Besides, digital imaging has a lot of improvement ahead of it and it’s going to be awesome. But of course I will miss film because it was so integral to my life in childhood.

Tell me about Mossless. When and why did it begin? What’s your favorite thing about it?
The idea for Mossless began in March of 2009. Two things spawned the blog: firstly, I always wanted to work in publishing, but I was enrolled in film school (I was yet to graduate high school) and had no foreseeable chances of getting an internship anywhere. I thought, sarcastically, that it would actually be easier if I just did it myself, but I knew it was true and I knew at that point that I was kind of screwed. But before I could do anything in print I would need to build a following or a reputation or something.

I was also a huge fan of Triangle-Triangle, which was pretty big at the time, but I felt like I wanted some context to the photographs I was seeing. So I started something like it with a little blurb underneath each picture: “[Photographer] is [X] years old and [something about them].” At first I based these on brief research but then I asked the photographers what they wanted. After some weeks I felt it wasn’t enough so I started interviewing photographers and I posted them every two days. I later had a few people helping with interviews here and there and in total we gathered over 300. A couple of blogs popped up that adopted the idea and took it to great places.

Anyway, much to my surprise, doing the same thing every two days gets really boring after a while so I had to take it up a notch again. Besides, people don’t read text on Tumblr (R. Gerald Nelson has a great essay on this). So I did a Kickstarter, emptied my savings and here I am with all these boxes behind me.

What is one thing you’re really looking forward to right now?
Taking photographs again.

In the work of 29-year-old photographer Mutsumi Makino, we are exposed to a view of her native Japan through its anonymous people and hidden places, unseen outside the hustle bustle of the country’s city spaces that populate tourist snapshots.

Makino has been taking pictures since she was 22 and received a film camera as a gift on the occasion of her first overseas trip. “It was start of my photo life,” she tells us. Since then, she has grown comfortable behind the lens and embarked on a journey to capture her surroundings—which are populated with his loved ones, animals and picturesque views of Miyazaki city.

“Miyazaki city is in the south. It is rich in nature, which is one of my favorite things about living here. The basis of my works is capturing nomal life with the people I love.”

Ulrika Kestere is a 23-year-old photographer from Lund, Sweden, whose passion for photography began at age 12 when she picked up the digital camera her father brought home, is inspired by the works of William Wegman, Tim Walker, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, Robin Schwarts and Paolo Roversi. Eschewing the candid, photojournalistic style practiced by many of her contemporaries at the moment, Ulrika is following in the footsteps of her influencers and creative composed and dramatic portraits and landscapes that are drenched in an icy distance, as though to keep the viewer at arm’s length. Expressions seem worried and mountains seem all the more treacherous when captured with her lens.

But of course there is a beauty in this distance. Many of Ulrika’s most striking images are presented, not alone, but rather as part of a pair. She explained to us that this desire to compare and contrast her work with itself  affects herself as much as it does us. “It’s amazing how two pictures next to each other, often portrait and nature, can bring out different moods from each other. I start with a portrait and then I look through my nature/location photos to see if I have something that would match with the picture. And often I find something that just makes the portrait pop beautifully—that simple picture will say something about the person on the portrait paired up with it.”

Ulrika began making a serious dent in the art world recently when her series, Girl With 7 Horses was picked up by a number of prominent art blogs. “People have really fallen in love with the series and have been so kind expressing this to me,” she tells us of the reaction to the series, which began solely as a way to incorporate animals into her images despite not having access to any. “I shot the first horse photo in early autumn last year and on my way home the story about the girl and her seven horses just came to me.”

The story she refers to goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a girl who had seven invisible horses. People thought she was crazy and that she, in fact, had seven imaginary horses, but this was not the case. When autumn came, the girl spent a whole day washing all her clothes. She hung them on a string in her garden to let the gentle autumn sun dry them. Out of nowhere, a terrible storm came and its forceful winds grabbed a hold of all her clothes and all seven horses (since they are invisible they obviously didn’t weigh much). The girl was devastated and spent all autumn looking for each horse spread around the country, wrapped in her clothes.

Detroit-based photographer Keith McArthur fell in love, not with the art itself, but with the camera (and the idea of a girl who owned one) when he was 15 years old.

“The girl I was dating at the time was taking classes and I would drive around rural Michigan with her taking photos of old silos, barns and bridges or whatever,” he tells us now, at the age of 28. “I think I fell in love with the camera as an object first. This piece of metal with all these buttons and dials. It was like a big ass decoder ring for getting a girl to make out with me in the back seat of her car.”

Thirteen years later, that girl is long gone (“[she] broke up with me, but I kept the camera and ran with it”) and Keith has instilled all that he learned from her, the Canon AE-1 he had his father buy for him with money he had saved up at an after-school job, and his time on a US Army Base in Maryland (where he tell us he “learned literally everything there is to know about photography” in the four years he spent in the military) into a portfolio of work depicting contemporary interpretations of classic Americana. Keith credits his style to the early influence of Robert Frank, whose book The Americans—the only photographic book in his local library—he kept on loan for a year.

“I immediately identified with the sort of American nostalgia but was also fascinated by the idea that photographs didn’t have to be these shiny, perfectly lit images I would see in magazines. Frank lead to Shore and Eggleston and I think those guys’ books really shaped how I see the world photographically.”

As well as the tattooed, beer-swilling girls, the gun-nuts and the 4th of July fireworks, Keith’s work also incorporates more gentle and introspective ideas in his pictures of his son.

“Photographing my son, Maverick, over the last nine years is definitely something I get a big kick out of. And it’s less of an immediate thing, and more like, “I can’t wait to look through these together as old men”. I suppose everything I press the shutter for is so I can look back on it years from now.”

The idea of just pressing the shutter is one that feeds into the classic photography adage—”f/8 and be there”—about being at the right place at the right time. Keith references the philosophy in his website f8alism, which also ponders “where “there” is supposed to be.”

“It’s just about loving to take photos and not worrying about doing “shoots” or “projects”. It’s just having a camera on you and using it instinctively.”

Beyond the lights of Times Square, the water around Ellis Island and the bridges in and out of Manhattan lies a view of New York that aren’t often seen on postcards or outside the work of 20-year-old photographer Miles Dixon. Dixon’s candid shots of bathers at Brighton Beach and high-rise inhabitants sharing lunch offer a glimpse of the real New York and wouldn’t be possible without his ease at aiming his lens at the unfamiliar.

None of my pictures are staged, and I never tell someone I’m taking their picture. I figure if I just take it they’ll either be okay with it, or they won’t; most people have bigger concerns than to care too much. I also find if you’re direct enough, and you don’t have anything to hide, then people won’t think you’re a creep. Either way you have to really want the moment. Someone usually forgets the few seconds of a picture being taken, but you won’t forget a missed opportunity.

When we asked the untrained photographer where he most liked to shoot in New York, he told us:

I don’t have a favorite place to shoot in the city, or at least not a constant one. For me it shifts. I bring my cameras everywhere, and whenever I feel like taking a shot, I do. Sometimes I find myself somewhere that I’ve already been, but for some reason it is completely new to me and much more interesting than the time before. Sometimes I don’t find anything interesting, so I just lean up against something and wait. This can go on for hours, but I always wait, and there’s never a time I don’t find something I like. My favorite thing is to walk to a place I’ve never been. Sometimes it’s 5 miles, sometimes it seems to be 5 feet from my apartment that I’ve never seen.