Hannah Kuo’s Photo Diary

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.”

Details

• Art by

  Hannah Kuo