INTRODUCING DEBBIE TEA

I come from Jakarta, Indonesia. When I was 17, I went to Australia to study  and then continued to The Netherlands until now. Sometimes I go back to Indonesia to visit my family and friends. Living there was kind of depressing. Especially now, it’s really hard for me to fit in the culture. Sometimes I even need to force myself to switch my mindset temporarily when I was there. Art is very limited in almost every way. In my opinion, people in Indonesia generally don’t appreciate art. They choose what pleases them, they choose what they know very well, they choose the ‘safe one’. It’s really unfortunate. But I hope this situation will change soon. I am 23. I started taking pictures in 2006, a friend of mine ‘introduced’ me to Holga, he used to show me his works taken with it and I just felt amazed at that time when I saw all the pictures he made. Not long after that I bought one myself. Around 2006 I felt very bored. I mean, I felt I was ‘stucked’ somehow. I was studying animation back then and I thought to myself ‘Ok this is not what I wanna do for the rest of my life’. I was pretty much desperate. But I was so lucky that my friend kept showing me his holga photos. He is somehow responsible for the photographer I became. I love to see a thing in a different kind of ways, dimensions, etc… To me it’s really nice to see how people react on my work. Sometimes I keep to myself the true intention of why I took a picture. I simply don’t want to ‘spoil’ it. I want to hear what they think.. it’s always an inspiration for me. My life has extremely changed I must say. So many huge things happened in my life that’s mainly related to photography in a way. Without knowing photography, I wouldn’t have met someone and fell in love, I wouldn’t have come to Europe to study fine arts photography, I wouldn’t have met my best, bestfriend. I wouldn’t have felt good about being myself and knowing I could take pictures pretty well. And you wouldn’t have asked me these questions. Haha :D This is a picture I took of a friend I was traveling with in Indonesia in the summer. It’s supposed to be her portrait. But somehow I can relate myself so much more to the picture. I think it’s actually my self-portrait. I’m not the best at explaining things. I can’t really say to you why this picture has deeper meaning for me. Probably you could say so. I’m in love with the artwork of Maurice Scheltens nowadays. I love how he plays with common objects we daily see and transform them into something surreal and uncanny. I also love the simplicity in most of his works. Very delicate, yet strong. They are simply stunning and very inspiring for me.

7:35 am  •  22 November 2009

INTRODUCING DEREK VINCENT

I am from a more rural area of the state of Connecticut in the United States.  It was great to live there because there was so much nature and natural beauty to explore.  I currently live in Boston.  It feels a little less inspiring at the moment than I’d like it to be.  I turned 24 years old last month.  I started taking pictures almost six years ago.  I took my father’s 35mm SLR back to school with me my freshman year of college to take long exposure night photographs in the city.  I really wanted to take normal scenes and make them look strangely different. I had zero knowledge of photography. With photography, I often want to cause myself and people around me to remember moments differently. This comes my initial attempts photography and the other things I did with the medium as I progressed over six years to where I am now, hopefully with a lot less of the cheesiness of cross-processing or multiple exposures that I had played around with at the start. With my 35mm point-and-shoot photographs, I try to catch everyday moments of my life and make them more surreal. Instead of a faint memory, I have some frame that emboldens a moment and alters the life it had.  Since I started taking pictures I’ve realized that I have become an observer, often stepping away from an action or scene to watch and wait for the opportunity to catch something with my camera.  There is a certain power to this, without the majority of my photographs, my memories would be faded and obscured.  However, the lens allows me to create unreal scenes that imply many actions, and and far from what really happened.  Without photography, I would have had to find another creative outlet because this takes up so much of my idle mind.  Also without the memories the photographs provide, the last years of my life would seem pretty boring.  I hope that I can do something more with it, that it’s not something I only do in my free time. This is a photo of a fire I started. Back in 2007, I worked as a forester and firefighter through a conservation agency known as the SCA for six months.  I worked on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington state. We were burning brush piles out in the forest that were cut to eliminate fuel for wildfires the next year. I was using a drip-torch, a can filled with a diesel/gas mixture with a flame at the end of a curly-cue spout. You tilt it over and gas dribbles out the end, gets ignited by the flame and falls to the ground. A photographer that I really like is my friend John Wilson. He is my neighbor and a filmmaker. He has little internet presence for his photography, as he is mostly interested in film. The photographs he does make do make me jealous. More specifically, there is a good grouping interspersed with short videos here. 

2:49 pm  •  21 November 2009

INTRODUCING CARLES RODRIGO MONZO

I live in Valencia, east of the Iberian Peninsula. A place with very good weather, plenty of sunshine which affects people’s mood. I don’t like it there very much because people are open to new artistic concepts, life, etc. I’m 24 years old. I’ve always taken photos of trips and holidays. Two years ago I’ve been taught how to develop film and from there I got into it more seriously. I also got a DSLR and I always learn somrthing new from my online searches. I want to bring a new vision of photography, make people more interested about it, excite them. As an industrial designer, I have always been thorough, passionate and obsessed with the detail on the furniture and objects, as a photographer I happen to carry this passion and obsession for detail to everything. I can not go down the street without noticing things and making mental pictures. I like all the cameras, each has something special, I buy them all. But I’ve always liked the polaroid and lately I bought a Yashica Fx-3 super 2000, which is very good. This is a picture of me standing in front of the tripod on a foggy night. Here’s what happened: it was late and I was about to go to sleep when I looked outside the window. The fog had covered the place and since this isn’t happening often around here I got dressed and went out in the field. Foggy forests are one of my obsessions so there was my chance to capture one. I like many photographers, in fact sometimes I do not even remember where  I find them and what their name is. One that stands out is Ryan Mcginley because his pictures are both natural and precious.

6:09 am  •  19 November 2009

INTRODUCING KYLE SCULLY

I’ve  lived in Vancouver, British Columbia for most of my life. Vancouver is a great city if you don’t mind rain 6 months out of the year. The summers here definitely make up for that though. I’m 22 years young. Britney Spears and I share the same birthday. My family were always taking photos when I was younger so I’ve always been around photography. I was given a few point&shoot cameras as a child which I used heavily, mostly taking photos of my friends skateboarding or biking. My friends jumping off homemade ramps. I think my eye for photography has defintely matured since. I find myself constantly looking for things to shoot in my everyday life. I hardly ever go out on a ‘mission to shoot photos’ anymore. My photos just kind of happen. What I seek through all this is to collaberate with friends. Create zines. Have shows. Publish books. Travel. And have fun while doing it. Without photography Ι wouldn’t have met and continue to meet a lot of amazing friends. I like anything film. I love experimenting with new cameras and adding them to my growing collection. This is a photo of a few party animals I met one night at the bar. I asked them if the had any tattoos and the dude on the left  showed me some pretty wild stuff, including a neck tattoo that said ‘Lucifer’. Sylvain Emmanuel is an amazing photographer living in France. I stumble across his work on flickr and fell in love with it  immediately. The subject matter is always interesting and the colour in his photos is great too.

6:34 am  •  17 November 2009

INTRODUCING MISSY PRINCE

I live in Portland, Oregon, a city surrounded by great natural beauty.  A short drive gets you to the ocean, the high desert, or deeply forested mountains, which is great if you’re into exploring those kinds of things. I’m 38. I got my first camera when I was about 15 but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I really got into
photography. I have a friend who always carries an Olympus XA and his great work inspired me to get one. At that point my interest really took off, and shooting became a natural extension of life. Moments don’t always present themselves
when it’s convenient, so it helps to always have a camera ready. I used to go for walks with bulkier gear hoping to catch something, but that seems so compartmentalized and forced. I don’t want to have to prepare that much. I want to enhance, rather than burden, my life with photography. I’ve always felt the impulse to document. Sometimes I keep a journal, but it’s hard to cross gracefully from the literal into the poetic without undermining believability. I’m finding it’s easier to do with a camera. I want to produce magical but very real accounts of life. I think I travel more often now in order to see things I haven’t seen before and certainly take pictures. I just hope to get greater satisfaction out of every day life. I was obsessed with my Polaroid SLR 680 for about a year, but I always return to the Olympus XA for it’s portability and sharpness. The trio in this picture used to come in often to the bar across from an apartment I once
rented. They were coming not to drink alcohol, but to drink coffee, chain smoke, and do word search puzzles. They each had their own book of puzzles and they would sit there working and chatting pretty late into the evening. They were a  great contrast with the generally younger hell-raising crowd. I am constantly inspired by the landscapes of Allie Mount, who I found on Flickr. Her black and white Polaroids are really wonderful, and I always learn from her subtle and elegant compositions. She’s also a total sweetheart.

11:16 am  •  12 November 2009

INTRODUCING MICHELA HEIM

I am a Swede residing in Oslo, Norway and most of the time feel absolutely lovely living here and sometimes I feel numb. Here are so many opportunities which is wonderful, but they also leave me confused. I am 26.  I was getting more seriously into photography, when I was around 19 and bought my first compact camera, I also got a Polaroid camera. I just loved it, in periods there were never any photos of me. I was always behind the camera. My self portrait fascination grew inside me, though. I actually don’t feel comfortable being in front of a camera. Taking photographs has always interested me. Being able to capture a story and making it your own. I was always carrying around the family album around the house leaving traces. Most of my photographs are for myself, for memories. But it is always wonderful and fun to hear that other people like what you do. I’d like to be better at facing myself in front of the camera. I always feel that I don’t know the person in my self-portraits. Look at Annette Pehrsson, her self-portraits are so genuine and beautiful, I feel speechless every time I look at them. I am observing much more, since I started taking pictures, leaving an impression of being distracted while looking around, noticing details and the beauty in flaws. I also met my boyfriend because of photography, and that is big. He completes me. There are periods when I fetisch a camera in my collection and just can’t stop using it beacuse it feels so good, and then the other day a complete different camera it is, and I abruptly change and use it all the time. This is taken by the lake close to my boyfriends parents house. Maybe you can’t see it, but he’s kissing my cheek. I not only love Aphra Natley’s mesmerizing stream, I love her as a person. I met her not long ago and I can say that. We’re so alike. She uderstands me. And I love talking to her. She is humble and genuine in her way to express herself and I admire that. Always and whenever, in lack of inspiration or when I just want to be filled with the most haunting stories, I look at Francesca Woodman’s work. It’s beyond everything I’ve ever seen. My boyfriend Oscar Hagbard. He builds pinhole-cameras and takes the most beautiful photographs with them. He inspires me with his wonderful playfulness every day, he is a big part of my life and life inspires me the most.

2:11 pm  •  9 November 2009

INTRODUCING COLBY MIERS

I’m from Santa Monica, California. It’s a lot warmer than Tivoli, New York where I’m going to school now. All the good schools are back east though so what can you do? I’m 19 years old, but I’ll be 20 in exactly one week. I started taking pictures pretty recently, I’d say within the last year. My dad was a photo major in college, so he’s always had a lot of vintage cameras lying around the house. A friend of mine named Paul invited me to go to this place called The Sunken City in San Pedro, California with him a year or two ago. It was an ambitious housing development built right on the ocean, and in the late 1920s was completely demolished by waves. Now it’s a tropical ghost town. You can still walk along the main avenue following what’s left of the sidewalk, but the cement’s really jagged and the road basically leads right into the ocean. I guess it’s kind of like that Shel Silverstein book Where The Sidewalk Ends. I remember wanting to document our experience there, so I bought a few disposable cameras and asked my dad to teach me  to use one of his old manual cameras. I remember really liking how the pictures came out, especially the disposable ones, and decided to start taking more pictures. Even now, I still have a few shots from that trip on my flickr. Right now I’m focusing on making a website for my photos. Besides giving prints to friends, flickr is really my only outlet. Although it’s great for networking, I don’t think it’s the best way to present my work. Stay tuned! For better or worse, since I’ve started taking pictures I tend to perceive the entire world around me as a potential photograph. It’s kind of like how skateboarders are continuously strategizing how they can skate any and all objects in their environment. In the same way, I can’t stop thinking about taking pictures even when I’m taking very few. I only have one camera and it’s a Yashica T-Zoom. People have told me the zoom lens isn’t as good as the fixed lens on the Yahsica T4, but I use the zoom function so often I’m glad I went with the choice I did. Besides that, I use disposables when I have the money. My next camera will probably be another point & shoot, maybe an Olympus Mju II or Contax T2 when I can afford one. This picture’s of a television my friends and I tried to set on fire last month. My friends Jeff and Carlos had an assignment for one of their art classes to bring in an object with the theme ‘destruction’, and they decided they would record the fire and bring the tape to class. We ended up driving deep into the woods to an abandoned warehouse where we wouldn’t be bothered, and the electricity generator we used to power the video camera wouldn’t even turn on. We didn’t want to burn the TV without power so we decided to wait until another night. I still was able to snap this photograph of someone spraying it with a fire extinguisher, and it’s since become one of my favorites. It’s sort of funny how the photograph of our failure to burn the TV is a lot better than the photograph I took the following week when we eventually succeeded. I think Hasisi Park from Korea is my favorite photographer right now. Her life seems so fun and interesting and she documents it in such compelling ways. For me, she’s really helped break the American stereotype that Asians are mostly conservative and uncreative. One of my other favorites right now is Mårten Lange from Sweden for completely opposite reasons. He shoots still-life’s almost exclusively, and all of the work I’ve seen is only in black & white. The high contrast and bareness of the atmospheres in his photographs is totally haunting and beautiful. Plus, I emailed him a few months back about getting ahold of one of his out-of-print books, and he offered to print any one of his photographs in return for one of my own. Isn’t that generous? I’ve got his photograph hanging right above my bed now.

5:39 pm  •  6 November 2009

INTRODUCING IRWIN BARBE

I’ve never lived more than two years in the same place (France, Antilles, California…). My worst nightmare is to get stuck somewhere for too long. I live near Bordeaux (France) and I can’t wait to move. 
I turned seventeen a month ago. When I was about fourteen years old, my father bought a digital camera. So I started taking a lot of pictures. I used to sneak out of my bedroom at night and walk around the town alone, taking pictures of empty streets. Since I was a kid, I’ve always been fascinated by images: I drew a lot, I’ve always watched tons of movies. I guess it’s that fascination that made me start taking pictures. It was not conscious, I didn’t have any goals such as “I want to become a photographer”. I want to shoot burning cars, lost animals in empty cities, and wounded teenagers. If not for pictures, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time on flickr.
 My Polaroid pro pack (1977) is my fetisch camera. It is totally unpredictable, but sometimes the results are wonderful.
 This is a picture of my brother and my sister taken this summer. We were supposed to go to a judo training, but instead we escaped and got really drunk in the middle of an empty football field, at sunset. Todd Hido’s work is both depressing and beautiful : cheesy motel rooms,
lost girls, empty landscapes…

4:42 pm  •  1 November 2009

INTRODUCING ALLA NESTULOVA

I live in Russia in a little town called Kostomuksha. It’s boring to live here. In the next year i will move to Saint - Petersburg. I’m 17. I started taking photos two years ago in my town. I had a little digital camera and I tried to make pictures with it. In spring of 2007 my classmate told me that she has Zenit 11 camera. Then I started to make film photos. My first film was no good. No, I don’t think I’m trying to achieve anything in particular. Maybe some day I could earn money by doing something like that. So far,  with a little help of my Zenit, I found mh boyfriend. Haha, I think this is my fetisch camera. I really want it! This is a photo of my boyfriend. He’s my very special one. He lives in Saint-Petersburg. It’s so far from me (about 1000 km). I can see him very rarely. I really miss him. He’s also a photographer. I wish I could link him but he doesn’t have any urls.

10:30 am  •  31 October 2009

INTRODUCING SASHA BORODINOVA AND LEILA MASHARIPOVA

We are from moscow, Russia, a country, with a lot of remains from the soviet union. We still live in a post-sovietic world but raised as kids in the west. The soviet union has left a great impact on us. We are 20 years old now. Once upon a time we felt for kef and we started to take pictures to remember what had happened the night before. We achieve something every day from it. For example today we learned to take pictures and play ping-pong at the same time. In general we want to break something, to burn, to fuck, to drink, to sniff up and show all this to our friends. And this is exactly what is happening. Photography made us break, burn, fuck, drink, and sniff up more often and more gracefully. Olympus mju ii is what we shoot with. One night we had drunk a lot and went to rescue leila’s boyfriend from cops and nazis, with whom he had some troubles in St. Petersburg. There was no need to carry a gun but we were so drunk that we stole my older brother’s one and went to the train station. Leila shoot off several times which was not a good idea, and in the end the morning found us at the same spot, getting sober and thinking how stupid we are. Igor O. lives in Yalta. His snapshots tell us about how the kids are living there. We are spiritually close, so we easily feel everything that stays out of the frame.

6:21 pm  •  29 October 2009