Loves Category

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.

Valentina Castro is a 26-year-old Venezuelan photographer whose passion for the craft began when a friend lent her his camera for the sake of a film-developing course. After quickly falling “in love with the process of analogue photography” and moving to Barcelona to study liberal arts, she began a degree in photography and has produced incredibly delicate and quiet pictures that create an enormous sense of intimacy.

Valentina’s use of light is particularly captivating, capturing slivers of sunlight trickling down a freckled back, over shoulders and across her loved ones’ bodies as they lay happily outdoors.

“I have a bit of an obsession, especially with natural light,” she told us. “What fascinates me about it is the contrast that it gives to colors, how colors get vivid, how shapes change. Everything is alive when there is a beautiful light and places become different. Light is like a magnet to me, whenever I see it, everything around gets interesting.”

Amidst her portfolio is a series Valentina began when visiting friends in Berlin. She fell instantly in love with the city—so much so that she plans to move there next year when she has completed her studies—a feeling that is apparent in her work.

“You can’t really say it is a “pretty” city, but it is so interesting,” Valentina tells us of the German city. “I love that you go there and you can see the history, you can see how it was; they didn’t delete their past, they live with it. There is art everywhere and you can feel freedom, everyone lives the way they want without bothering the rest of the people.”

When 25 year-old Cristina Juárez took up photography, it was not for artistic reasons but rather as a meditative respite from her studies.  ”My father gave me a digital camera about five years ago, and from that moment on, photography became an activity that helped me to take a break from my school activities. I found it very relaxing.”

Her casual approach to the art is surely one of the driving forces behind the overwhelmingly effortless sense of calm each of her images evokes. Be they snapshots of her friends exploring forest trails or portraits of horses waiting lazily in the Mexico sun, there is nothing forced or excessive about Cristina’s work.

After she became comfortable working with digital formats, Cristina has extended her reach to experiment with analog photography (the reversal of every photographer born before the 1980s) and her work now carries the saturated hues and unexpected light patterns of film.

“I have a great love for my digital camera because it was a special gift from my father, and I think this kind of camera offers a practical way to work—but sincerely I prefer film. I experiment every time I go to a photographic laboratory because I can expect many things. In each frame of film I can remember objects, friends, special moments and spaces.”

Despite being taken all over the world, the pictures created by 23 year-old photographer David Montes Fernández never once venture into tourist territory. Forget awkward, static images of backpack-wearers grimacing outside landmarks—his personal shots of friends and family are natural and show them absorbing the places to which they have travelled. When taking pictures, David tells us, he seeks out “the perfect harmony between the subject and the place.”

The Spanish Advertising student first became interested in photography when he was very young, taking pictures and videos of his sister playfully posing like a model, but became engrossed in the art at the same time he caught the travel bug, and the two have been inextricably linked ever since.

“For me photography means travel, new landscapes and beautiful places to see. It is part of my life. I’m obssesed with making trips and getting pictures of every new place I see.”

Despite being relatively new to the game—he only began shooting in the summer of 2010—the work of 25-year-old photographer John Kilar is expansive and impressive, shedding light onto the characters and landmarks of his home in Venice, California. Half of his portfolio could be mistaken for stills from Red Hot Chili Peppers music videos, while the other half captures the west coast’s hazy dreaminess perfectly.

“Venice has very special energy and it’s extremely easy to find inspiration around here,” John tells us, “I’m constantly surrounded by extraordinary art and artists, along with the eccentric individuals which make this town so unique.”

Those artists and eccentrics appear frequently in his images; from the teenage skate punks to the robed men and the Burning Man stalwarts, Kilar paints a picture of Venice as an all-inclusive playground.

When Shanna Allyn packed up her life in New York City a year ago, she left behind a life as an editor in television to pursue photographic arts in Minneapolis.

“I knew I wanted to do a series of portraits of women,” Allyn tells us of Strange Beautiful, the series she has since produced that is taking images of femininity and turning them on their beautiful heads, “I wanted the series to reflect metamorphosis, an evolution in society, in women, in men and how things shift and change. When I started, I had intentions of creating women that looked partially like dolls. As the series continues, the clothes come off and the eyes are exposed. The photographs progress into something different and a transition begins between man and woman. Woman begins to evolve into man and man evolves into woman.”

This gendered transition she speaks of occurs in Strange Beautiful’s fifth installment, in which the images of doll-like girls covered in mud, bruises and tattoos—often with parts of their bodies disguised significantly or “missing”—morph into ones of an androgynous man mirroring the gestures and expressions of a heavily made-up woman whose image alternates with his.

Allyn—whose artistic inspirations range from Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman to Lykke Li and Fiona Apple—hesitantly agrees with our reading of her work as feminist in their distortion of traditional beauty and subversion of the idea of what is “right” for a woman to be and do.

“It could be seen that way. I like to capture an understanding of being a woman and conveying that through a photograph or series of photographs that possibly other women can connect with. Men as well.”

See more from Strange Beautiful here.