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This following retrospective look was birthed from the continued curiosity of my own art and artistic direction, but this time surrounding the post-processing stage of my art. This is also another crucial stage to my artistic endeavors, even though I know a lot of my fellow photographers would really beg to differ for those who emphasize on the pure, raw, “untampered-with-ness” of photographic images. To some extent, I agree with the demand for images to look “perfect” straight from the viewfinder, because it pushes me to be very disciplined and well-studied on my exposure, compositional skills and art-sensitive eye; in other words, it refines The Mind’s Eye. On the other hand, focusing completely on raw images straight from the camera (especially for digital shooters) neglects an entire important edge of that artistic holy trinity of color/lighting/composition - color. While I do understand that the disciplines of color can be composed through viewfinder practices where I can pick better-colored subjects that interact with one another in a more harmonic way, what some are failing to see is that street candid photography is chaotic, and it does a glorious job at being such. Requiring a completely objective coherent and interesting artistic story to be told out of the same frames of view that thousands, if not millions, of people see similar to one another places a high demand on the world around you to be, quite literally, picture perfect. And it brings me great pain to admit, the world really isn’t perfect, and it is quite a far hike away from perfect. And the most observable imperfection that I am able to observe coming across such sprawling urban cities such as Austin, Saigon, or even Singapore, is the color. It is extremely difficult to demand that such highly populated and highly diverse places to unify in terms of color palette choices, and to an extent that is even a testament to the beauty of the diversity and relative harmony people are able to achieve in these areas. That being said, that gap in artistic perfection of the world around me is where I was able to come in, and by filling in that artistic gap by studying color harmony and introducing color coherency as a transportation means of storytelling, I create, in my opinion, complete artworks.
The colors I choose to incorporate into various pieces of my works all stem from the stories I tell myself in my head as I edit my images, knowing full well that the majority of them would be very much lost in translation. I write stories in my mind as I shoot and continue them as I edit, and I run through those story scenes as I go through my editing process, photo by photo. The earliest I could remember coming up with and employing this practice was during my first few frames I shot of Austin, Texas. Standing out from all of them were two stories I told myself resulting in two of the images I made, which I titled Toy Girl and Parallel Worlds, from this very album.
(Toy Girl, part of Smoke and Mirrors - Courtesy of Yours Truly)
Toy Girl was one of the first occurrences I could remember of me catching myself telling myself a story as I go through each component of my editing process. This was an incredibly fun story that I used to cross-check every single edit and modification to ensure everything is consistent and coherent, and that every piece of the artistic puzzle fits into the overarching story, and that that story has to govern everything that went on in the image. Granted, this wasn’t the most perfect image I’ve made, and as time goes on I keep finding more and more flaws and inconsistencies within my composition and editing, but I will never come back and revisit to tamper with it again, since this completed piece is a marker of a very effective transition into a profoundly me way of doing photography. As far as I can remember and can summarize, the story of the Toy Girl was about a girl that was left a complete mess by all the romantic endeavors she has ever been through. She never seemed to have much luck in finding a true partner, and everyone she had been close with treated her as an emotional and mental dumping ground, and a result of being open and welcoming to romantic partnerships (the transparent glass at the front of the toy store), she had seen a lot, and had accumulated within her a significant amount of heavy baggage coming from so many different walks of life (the different-colored and textured toys in the toy store, all desaturated and darkened within the confines of the toy store). Yet, through thick and and thin, she is an inherently passionate individual at heart (the red/pink-colored hair) and she continues to wear her heart on her sleeve and retains a warm and welcoming approach towards life and people around her (the bright “OPEN” sign brightly neon greeting people outside of the store window). Even though her past was littered with toxicity disguising as generosity, stability, and companionship (the green open hand as a chair behind her back), in her future awaits people by her side who are just as passionate and just as driven as her, who are fully supportive of her and will be there for her (the pink/red colored set of chairs a bit further in front of her, the pink differing slightly from her own red hair meaning that the girl has her own very unique personality, but all of them are similar enough to harmonize together, and that all of them are similarly passion-driven), and they will be there for her support. Even though she had always been toyed with and people had always been treating her heart like nothing but a cheap toy, her heart still remains as pure as a children's toy in another positive sense, and she still loves and accepts very openly.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the story behind Toy Girl. It is a story that, to this day, I am still incredibly proud of, and one that had created a prideful image and a monumental shift in the way I approach photography. At the risk of repeating myself again, I have found my way to a profoundly me way of photography, and to me that is the correct way of photography.
(Parallel Worlds, part of Smoke and Mirrors - Courtesy of Yours Truly)
The story of Parallel Worlds is one that is slightly different, and admittedly one that is a tiny bit more straightforward in terms of story, presentation, and interpretation, and supposedly more easy to access and relate to in several different ways. It details a story about a couple (two lonely people respectively on the left and right) who, despite so many attempts of trying to be with one another, they never end up making their joint story work for each other. The man is devastated having had to pick up his own mess throughout that process (the bulky silhouette of a backpack on the bench right next to him), the girl never seemed to want to stay around, and ended up walking away on her own predetermined path (the walkway to the right). They are so opposite in so many ways, he was energetic and she was reserved (the sun/shade and yellow/blue contrast), he was old, mature, and committed, and she was young, naive, and uncommitted (the contrast between the two types of clothing both characters were wearing, and the contrast between the sitting guy and the striding girl). Even though they were so physically close (the very walkable transition between the sun and the shaded area), there was always an inexplicable barrier between them that was impossible to ignore, and in a sense that barrier, that avoidance, was the essence of who she was and how she wanted to live her life, as it had given her protection from the “cruel” world around her (the columns and pillars from the building the girl was walking under and giving her shade, the main structure holding up the way that she walks). She can never let herself get too close to him, or in fact anyone at all, and as a result he was left behind alone to carry the burden of the failed relationship. I deliberately chose blue and yellow instead of blue and red, like my usual contrast patterns would be employed to aid with storytelling, since I want to still paint a harmonic picture that comes together quite nicely, and showcasing that there is something a bit sickeningly beautiful about that tragic story, that in some other Universe, some other version of this story might have actually worked. The colors didn’t seem to contrast one other in a conflicting manner, instead they were intended to complement one another, and they were just two temperatures of the same source of light.
These stories are obviously removed from the final product, and I do not ever mention them as writeups alongside my photographic pieces. At least not until now for this analysis. But at the same time, this is still only for people who care to look and find out deeper about my photographs, beyond that which I present as final products on the surface. But that is completely by design. By removing these very subjective stories from the equation and leaving a jigsaw-shaped hole in the story space, I can once again leave a gap within my art that the keen and driven viewer can fill in by themselves. The beauty to me resides in how shockingly similar, or starkly different, their stories can be from these ones of my own. Their act of filling in these gaps with their own jigsaw pieces conveys their own individual stories and how it can relate to stories I tell myself or experience by myself. If effective (which I do hope some/any of my pieces are), these acts of filling in story gaps would motivate anyone who views my art to take a reflective look back at their own lives while on their quest of relating to (or contrasting with) these stories I’m telling. A photograph is art because it holds attention and invokes thought. I am very much aware that for most photographs I produce, I am still quite inefficient at achieving this philosophy, but that is a testament to the fact that I have still, as of yet, not mastered this craft, no matter what mastering means, and there is still so much to be learned, and I interpret that sentiment in the most positive manner possible.
Visit my Behance to view all photos of the full project: