Q&A
Alex Kang has provided us with an intriguing and intimate selection of work, bringing various images together from a collection that pulls at her own personal feelings of sentimentality. This is a very unguarded way of selecting her work and with her beautifully simple aesthetic style and innocent images, her work is both uncomplicated and refreshing.
How long have you been taking pictures? And what got you started?
I would have been about sixteen (nineteen now), my dad purchased a digital point and shoot. I sat down and fiddled with the manual settings a while until I got the gist of how the relationship between aperture and shutter speed could change the picture. After that I took apart some old busted up cameras to see how they worked and I suppose that’s how it began.
Who are your influences?
I like street and documentary photography the most. Anders Petersen and Trent Parke take amazing pictures. I wish I had Bruce Gilden’s attitude toward street photography. I think he’s hilarious.
What are your reasons for working (predominantly) in square format?
Sometimes with portraits I prefer the square format, I find it frames the face more pleasingly than a rectangular frame. It’s also very incidental. My favourite cameras to use just happen to be 6x6 cameras.
Do you have a reason for using black and white film much more than digital and what’s your process at the point of shoot?
At the moment I prefer to take pictures on black and white film rather than projecting them onto digital sensors because pixels are so much more dynamic than silver halide salts and sometimes I don’t prefer it that way.
I use one film predominantly (Kodak Tri-x) and I like to use it a lot because after a lot of trial and error with shooting and developing, I find it easier to predict how it will behave and to know what aspects of the light to take advantage of.
Considering only four or five variables at the point of shoot: depth of field , the edges of the frame, how the highlights and shadows will come out, where somebody’s eyes are looking. All those sort of things. I find you are much more likely to get a better result when you try to get a few aspects on the nail. It’s a simpler picture than the one where you can change the dynamic range, colour temperature , ISO (and soon enough, focus) and a million other variables, but sometimes it can be a more imposing picture too.
Have you had any exhibitions, or have any coming up?
A million years ago I fluked a kind of final high school examination and they put some of my pictures up in the art gallery of NSW. I haven’t exhibited anything as a finished project since then and in the near future I don’t plan on it. There’s a lot more to explore and I’m still in the beginning.
For me, your images have a very strong style. Do you agree with this?
I suppose so, though not particarly different than a lot of other people’s. I don’t consciously try and ‘shoot one style’ so to speak but there are some aspects of pictures that I like more than others and maybe I focus on them more. I don’t really like pictures that really punch you in the face. Some people are very good at those pictures and for magazines you need that kind of immediate grab, but I don’t think I could take pictures like that. Sometimes I prefer pictures where some of the content is missing and it doesn’t tell you exactly what’s going on. It might be what’s in the shadows or what’s not in the frame. It might just be a facial expression looking off camera. Those pictures are my favorite kind to look at. You can explore them for a long time.
What are your ambitions in relation to your photography?
If photography takes me anywhere I hope it takes me toward a human photography.
And finally, hot tea or iced tea?
Above 80º celcius or just throw it out.