Loves Category

Twenty-two year-old photographer Amandine Paulandré is using her studies of philosophy at La Sorbonne to delve deep into the psyches of her enigmatic subjects in the hazy 35mm photos that make up a large portion of her online portfolio.

Her portraits (of both her friends and celebrities like Azealia Banks, who she recently shot for an issue of VICE STYLE) are inquisitive and intimate, inviting us to experience mood changes and personal explorations from the other side of the world.

Amandine started taking pictures at a very young age, as a bored 8 year old living in a small village in a ski resort. The plan to give their daughter a creative outlet kind of backfired on her parents though, as Amandine had a habit of quickly depleting rolls of film and “they got a bit pissed off that they were always paying for the development of photos of my cat.”

Apart from her feline friends—who still feature occasionally in her pictures—Amandine’s work is focussed exclusively on her two greatest loves; the natural environment and people that surround her.

“I would like my images to be telling that the person [in it] and I are friends, that they feel comfortable with me. I try my best to let them do what they want. I try to focus on what makes a good image, like the lighting, the pose, the framing…I get tired very easily so I never shoot for very long;  one hour is the maximum I can do with keeping in mind a sense of aesthetic. My images translate my emotionality, my romanticism, my girly mind, my love for space… I suppose this is what I am and I sometimes find it to be transcribed into my images.”

In 2011, Portable’s ongoing series of photographer profiles, Loves, has featured dozens of exciting talents, both new and established. One of them is New York-based photographer Spencer Wohlrab, whose awe-inspiring photo diary of a trip to Iceland took our breath away when we featured it earlier in the year. As well as shooting personal and commercial images, Spencer’s collaborated on a series of exciting new fashion editorials for Stylecaster.

Rather than spending another article heaping praise upon his work, we asked Spencer to give props to the photographers he thinks we’ll be seeing more of in 2012. Click through for his favorites.

The moody, enigmatic work of photographer Alice Axinder would move us just as tremendously were she a graduate student in her mid-20s, but the fact that she is just 17 makes her ghostly depiction of her native Sweden all the more impressive.

“I started taking pictures in the beginning of 2009,” she told us. “A lot of my early pictures are photos of the ocean, as i have always enjoyed it a lot and tried to stay close to it.”

Looking through a year’s worth of her images, we are drawn deep into a European year of blistering winters, determined sunrises and blossoming spring. The palette of grey and blues are comfortingly steely, and vignettes of people cloaked in scarves seem all too familiar thanks to Alice’s adoration of all who pass in front on her lens.

“My friend Sara is the most beautiful person I have seen in real life, I believe. She often does not want me to take pictures of her, but I cannot help myself. The combination of the curve of her lips or her sharp jawbone or her great sad eyes, along with lonely tree branches in winter or vast waters in summer evenings are the kind of things that inspire me a lot. When I take pictures of other people than her I think what I look for is familiarity—I want my photos to feel like home or a safety a lot of the time.”

We asked Alice which of the seven deadly sins she would compare her work to, and she told us she related it to Sloth.

I think many of my pictures have a laziness in them— do not mean this in a bad way, I like it when things are just content. But I suppose my work, with its often cool colours and moods, can be associated with sloth in the calmness of it and the passivity—like how you sometimes do not care to do anything about things that bring you a great amount of emotion (be it angst, sadness or joy) and instead you cannot move even your left hand to react at the storm inside of you. This kind of stillness is probably the atmosphere in my photos that mostly resembles a deathly sin.

When we first encountered the work of New York-based photographer Sunny Shokrae, we were overwhelmed with a sense of familiarity. It’s as though the people and places existing in her images were ones we too knew intimately and we had been invited along on the vacations and late night adventures she captures.

We spoke with the USCS graduate about the people in her pictures and the way she wants her work to make us feel.

PORTABLE: When and why did you start practicing photography?
I’ve been making pictures since middle school. It was my way of keeping a record of things, the people in my life, how they changed, the places I went, and the subtleties other people didn’t notice. I didn’t start looking at my photography formally or understanding the power photos have in general until much later, at which point I began refining myself technically, around my early twenties. I never stopped taking pictures, and, eventually, it didn’t make sense for me to focus on anything else. I was, and continue to be, totally in love with it.

Do you approach commissioned and personal work differently?
Yes & no. With commissioned work, there’s a client involved, you have to make sure to communicate and collaborate with them clearly and effectively, and in the end you’re making someone else happy first, then yourself. With personal work, you only have you to worry about. These two come together in this—clients hire you based on your personal work, so the idea is that you are making them happy through what it is that you love and do well. That’s why its so important to put work out there that is from the heart rather than work that’s made to look a certain way to land a job.

Who are the people you like to shoot most? What do you look for—psychically and emotionally—in your subjects?
I’m a curious person, it’s endless. People from all backgrounds and all walks of life fascinate me. What makes a shoot fun and breezy (in regards to the subject) is confidence. To a certain extent, as the photographer, it’s my job to make someone feel comfortable and unstoppable, and to get what I want out of them, but when a subject embodies that themselves from the start, well, that just makes the best situation possible. I feel a person out rather than look for something; you have to have a good understanding of people and of yourself. Most of the time you won’t really have much time with someone and you sort of have to feel them out and go from there. With people I know more intimately, that are in my day-to-day life, I shoot them as I see them, as I know them, and with the affection I have for them. With models or subjects less familiar to me, it’s whatever sets them apart physically in most cases, whether it’s a huge gap between their teeth or freckles head to toe. Attitude is really important.

What do you do when you’re not taking pictures?
Archiving, editing, organizing and watering my plants. Even outside of jobs I carry my camera with me just about everywhere, in the midst of doing almost everything. It doesn’t mean I take photos constantly, which is what I used to do, but I like to have it close just in case.

What three words best describe how you want people to feel when they’re looking at your work?
Connected, amused, euphoric

Which of the 7 deadly sins do you think best represents your work?
Going with pride here because I’d like to think showing what people are most proud of and ready to defend is always a good look.

The images captured by Brooklyn-based photographer Peggy Ann McDonnell invite us into her most intimate and personal encounters with the men in her life, and express sentiments of masculinity so rarely shared.

“I worked with one subject for a few years and that body of work was driven more by the physical rather than anything terribly emotional,” the 24 year-old Parsons graduate told us of the way she chose her subjects, “I spent a lot of time with him and found myself inspired by his movements and poses that would happen naturally—it’s always quite difficult to recreate these things on purpose.”

As well as her portraits that showcase the physicality of one man, Peggy’s series of Polaroids are more expansive, capturing an assemblage of male subjects—some seeming more willing to be photographed than others—in the vulnerability of the bedroom.

“This series developed really naturally…It started as documentation of the boys I found myself spending time with. Then they became my collection—souvenirs.”

Unlike the majority of the photographers and artists we feature here, Brooklyn-based Youngna Park is not exclusively creative in the medium. As well as taking images that are both external to action and intimately compelling, she designs content strategies for businesses, manages print and digital projects and produces design events and video shoots. She took time out from her position as managing producer of the feature-length music video Girl Walk // All Day (which is premiering this week) to talk to us about the project and her love of photography.

When and why did you start doing photography?

I started casually taking photographs of friends and environments on campus at Cornell University around my junior year of college. This was 2003 or so. I’d figured out how to build basic websites around the same time, and liked the idea of keeping an online photo journal of these final years of college. I began posting images online on the off chance that someone outside my friends would find them.

At the same time, I discovered an exploding community of photobloggers in New York, including Bluejake, Rion.nu, Slower.net, Quarlo, Infrangible, etc and would peruse these from my dorm room, wishing I lived in New York City. I started my own photoblog around this time and found there was an enormous amount of reciprocity and feedback being shared in the online community. This really encouraged me to constantly challenge myself to make more work, post it, get feedback, learn from this and to keep going.

Tell us about the Girl Walk project and your participation in it.

Girl Walk // All Day is a feature-film-length dance music video set to the DJ Girl Talk’s album, ‘All Day’. It’s an urban dance adventure that takes place across New York City, during the course of one day. The film is on its eve of its New York premiere on December 8th with a big party sponsored by Kickstarter, where we raised the funds to make the film. My husband, Jacob Krupnick, is the film’s director + cinematographer and also developed the concept and story for the film. A few years ago, he met two dancers, Anne Marsen and John Doyle, while making a film installation project for a fashion show. He knew he wanted to collaborate on a much larger project with them, that would incorporate their highly improvisational dance styles into a story celebrating public expression, public space and New York City. We’re going to be showing the film in a series of live interactive events (in New York and beyond!) that’ll have live DJs, a dance party, lots of audiovisual performances and more. Each screening event will be unique to the space and community it is in.

I’ve played a lot of roles since the project first began: I spent many days out filming with the tiny crew, taking stills, and operating the boom box. I take the lead on communications (from our blog and social media to newsletters, partnerships and sponsorships). I produce our growing lineup of events and screenings, and lastly, manage the development and design of our website.

What are your favorite things—living or inanimate—to photograph?
Windows, plant life, tables where meals have been enjoyed, rooms or canvases of space that have been used then departed, people who are not the center of attention, communities that still find cameras a novelty, intersections of textures, both man-made and natural, my family.

When you’re not taking pictures, what do you do?
Work-wise, I help develop interactive projects (building and redesigning websites, apps and physical environments) at an agency in DUMBO. I also do styling, art directing, and concept development for editorial shoots + videos. My husband and I are in the midst of launching a creative studio called Wild Combination, of which Girl Walk // All Day is the first major endeavor.

Outside of work, my husband and I also like to host dinner gatherings at home; in the past this has included a pickle party, a salad party and a massive New Year’s Eve Eve Korean feast. I also bake constantly, satisfying my for-now-dormant desire to have my own bakery. One of the balconies in our apartment was transformed into a 3.5′ x 8′ planter box (full of 800 lbs of soil!), where I also keep a miniature garden with tomatoes, herbs and lots more.

If your house was burning down and you could only save one picture you’ve taken, which would it be?
It’d definitely be a photo I took of my dad’s tomato seedlings growing in my parents’ bedroom. My dad is a devoted backyard heirloom tomato grower and dedicates months to selecting and then cultivating upwards of 2 dozen varieties of tomatoes a year. He starts the seeds in trays indoors, in March, when it’s too cold to plant them outside. In order to maintain the perfect temperature for the seeds to germinate, he puts the seed trays over the radiators in his bedroom. To me, this image captures his intense and obsessive dedication to gardening, which I love. The image is called Window, Niskayuna (Tomato seedlings).

A series of Youngna’s work is currently on display in the store Saffron (31 Hanson Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn). The show ‘Life Near Windows’ is on show until January 7, 2012.

Last year, when he was just 21 years old, Bolognese fashion editor Andrea Quarantotto founded Up-and-Coming Style, a photography webzine dedicated to fashion in all its facets. Inspired by visual arts his whole life, Quarantotto picked up a camera this past March, and began cementing his place beside his heroes.

“I went from theory to practice,” he explains to us of his entry into photography. “Like a teenager in 1977 inspired by the punk scene to pick up an instrument and play, to express that exciting musical period. I understood that to really express what I had in my head I needed to shoot the photos myself, in order to represent the concepts that I held internally. All this started in March of this year, before that I didn’t feel the need at all to take photos.”

Despite never having dreamt of a career behind the lens, Quarantotto’s list of inspiring figures is thorough and diverse. He rattles off names like Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Ellen Von Unwerth, linking the seemingly disparate figures with the observation that “something many of them have in common is massive use of flash photography, and it’s something I adore, since it’s a tool which allows you to distort reality and conceptualize it in a more raw and authentic way.”

Flash photography, Quarantotto tells us, is not valued in his home of Bologna, a place that he says was “an important cultural center for Italy in the post-war period, [but] is now suffering from a real artistic paralysis.”

“In terms of fashion photography I’m afraid things are very insular and provincial here…The publication Up-and-Coming Style came out of the desire to release Bologna from the paralysis that has set in here recently on the photographic front. I don’t deny that there are plenty of people interested in the city’s underground and subcultures, but there is no kind of unity, and so one of the project’s objectives was to bring them together.”

The work of 25 year-old photographer Mate Ugrin is like a story half-told. His pictures—some taken in his home city of Belgrade, but most his travels around the world—show you where and when moments are occurring but allow you to fill in the whys and hows yourself.

Ugrin is currently completing a diploma in film—something that is taking up all of his spare time—and his eye for cinematic composition and scenes is apparent in his shots of young woman traversing rocky landscapes, swimming into empty expanses of water, getting lost in the forest or taking trips to unknown destinations.

New York-based photographer Hannah Kuo has travelled to Taipei, New Zealand, North Carolina and other parts of the United States, with each trip documented extensively and immortalized thanks to her habit of capturing every moment she experiences on film.

“I sport a “pics or it didn’t happen” attitude,” the 23 year-old Parsons graduate told us, “I often keep a 35mm point and shoot lying around. If I don’t have an actual camera with me, there’s always the camera on my phone.”

Kuo’s images represent the free-spiritedness often associated with New York graduates’ lifestyles; to look at her online diary of photographs is as if the months of snow that smother the city don’t exist, and every day holds the potential to break open hydrants and take trips upstate to explore swimming holes. Always with a roll of film on hand, of course.

“My subjects are hardly ever conscious of me shooting them and that is what makes them more genuine,” Kuo says of her knack for closing the shutter at just the right moments to ensure genuine candidness. “I usually don’t have any directions to offer because I tend to say awkward things, especially to strangers, but I guess that’s nice sometimes.”

When we asked Hannah what art movements she thinks her art most resembles, she told us, “I don’t think I can resemble my work to the philosophy of any particular art movement, though if I must, I would say… at the moment I feel that Surrealism and the aesthetics of New Wave cinema influences the way I see and approach things, documentary and portraiture then becomes my chosen style of visual output. My work expresses my values for the time being.”

And the one art movement she’d most like to see re-emerge?

“I would have to say macaroni art.”

The portraits captured in the lens of 24 year-old photographer Chelsee Ivan have a tendency to be stark, honest and unyielding representations of women. From the image of a woman with bruised eyes staring down the barrel of the camera to anonymous nudes sitting, solitarily, among expanses of snow, there is something equally beautiful and terrifying in the work of the Canadian design and photography graduate’s work.

“It is not conscious,” Chelsee told us when we asked if our reading of her work as a comment on ideas of femininity was her intention, “I just generally feel most comfortable shooting women.”

Whether they’re in a calm state of undress, extending their arms over their heads to reveal armpits au naturel, munching on a hard boiled egg after taking a shower, or closing their eyes and refusing to engage with the camera (in a traditional sense, anyhow), Chelsee’s subjects—who are generally “My best friends, my family members” and the people she’s closest to—all reveal fragments of their personalities to her, and then to us, leaving us to assemble the rest.

To learn more about Chelsee’s perspective on her own images, we asked her to compare them to one of the seven deadly sins, to which she responded: “Envy. The people I photograph are beautiful, I have never felt I am beautiful. I wish I were beautiful.”

If a photographer’s identity is in any way linked to the work they produce, then we’re certain there is no lack of beauty in Chelsee Ivan or her life.