Jun 5, 2013 | Clippings, Fashion, Music, Portraits, Youth
I am going to be playing catch up over the next month or two – lots of new work and clippings to share. These images are from an awesome article for The New Yorker delving into Korean pop music (aka K-pop). I flew down to Jakarta to witness a massive stadium concert featuring some of the biggest names in K-pop from S.M. Entertainment and take portraits of Girls’ Generation. The nine member group consists of Taeyeon, Jessica, Sunny, Tiffany, Hyoyeon, Yuri, Sooyoung, Yoona and Seohyun. It was easily one of my most stressful photographic experiences. The management closely grooms these girls for years and try to control their media presence very closely. They were suspicious of what The New Yorker would detail and didn’t provide me with any information on how to get into the stadium properly. I was lucky enough to find a sympathetic security guard who let me into the backstage area where I only had fifteen minutes to set up all my lighting gear and another fifteen minutes with Girls’ Generation to take the actual photographs. Luckily they had some nice pink satin backdrops that worked well with my ring flash. Girls’ Generation knew how to pose for the camera as well, of course. The New Yorker Photo Booth blog interviewed me about the shoot here. These are some of the hottest up-and-coming stars in K-pop.
Sep 21, 2011 | Fashion, Youth
Over the past few years, I have obsessively explored and photographed theme parks all over China. These are some of my favorite places to investigate changing notions of leisure and other trappings of “modern” lifestyles now enjoyed by the country’s nouveau riche. I also fancy myself a bit of a fashion photographer, so I was most pleased when I was approached by Dominick Hill, a friend and famed founder of Plastered 8 T-Shirts, to shoot some photographs at the Beijing World Park alongside Ren Hang, an up-and-coming Chinese photographer with amazing model friends. The theme was ennui. The Beijing World Park is a most unique and amazing place – a shabbier northern cousin of the Windows on the World theme park in Shenzhen. Hundreds of small-scale models of famous monuments, buildings and natural wonders from around the world are spread over expansive grounds. It is a wonderful place to spend an odd afternoon. Here are some of the results.
Jun 30, 2011 | Fashion, Music, Youth
You might be able to tell by now, but I am way behind on my posts. These shots were all taken during the second day of the 2011 Strawberry Festival on May 1. Whoops. Anyway, better late than never. The rise of the Chinese hipster brought much controversy this past year. There were naysayers calling them hacks and shallow followers, others too clueless to know where to look in the first place, while some dug deeper and provided taxonomies or even tracked Chinese überhipsters (trans-identity-meta-hipster-awesomeness). So, despite the general lack of irony and fixed-gear bikes in China, I still stand behind my previous assertions of the importance of this new wave of urban youth trying to stand out from the crowd and make it on there own. Identity in urban china is an ever-mutating beast, but there is no denying that people are trying to reach deeper and tap into more creative currents. Alternative lifestyles, especially in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Chengdu and Guangzhou are on the rise and need to be celebrated. Here are a few of those who are visually standing out for better or worse.
