Carson Gilliland

Where are you based?

Currently, I am based in Sarasota, Florida, where I attend Ringling College of Art and Design, pursuing my Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography.


What is your background in Photography? What got you into it?

To be quite honest, my background really is not that exciting. I originally took a liking to photography when I was a young lad, and my parents would take my brother and I on trips to around the states every Summer. I always carried my Polaroid camera due to my need for instant gratification. I guess this was the motivating factor that  got me into photography classes at my high school and the rest is history.


What Equipment do you use?

I usually shoot with a Mamiya RZ 67, Bronica SQA, and sometimes a Canon 5D Mark II.


What is your creative process? Are your shots planned or spontaneous?

I really do not think I have a creative process for some strange reason, which is probably a bad thing once I hit the job market. I am more of a spontaneous kind of person, so most of my images were just stumbled upon while driving around town or hanging with my fellow friends.


At lot of your work seems to be taken at night, what draws you to this?

I am drawn to the night for many a reasons. The sense of dead calm allows me to concentrate on the subject, and the peacefulness of driving around with the windows down and cool wind rolling in just keeps me at peace no matter where or who I am with. With the five to ten minute exposures I partake in, the free time allows me to write to pass the time. I feel my poetry has also been dramatically affected by my fascination with the night.


Who or what inspires you?

I am always receiving inspiration from many photographers whose work I run across on a daily basis, but those who have had a profound affect on my work include Todd Hido, Alec Soth, Nicholas Haggard, Peter Granser, Rob Stephenson, Greg Miller, and Mathieu Bernard – Reymond.


What drives you to keep taking pictures?

There is not much of a driving force that keeps me shooting. To me, photography is like a really delicious food. You absolutely love it, but in commodity and time. I know this sounds absurd, but it is the best way for me to describe how I feel about photography. Sometimes I will be out every evening and night shooting for a week straight, while the week after I won’t go out once to shoot. It has nothing to do with a dying interest in photography, which is most certainly not the case. I just do not feel I will improve my work or style by pushing myself to go shoot, for that has never helped me. That is really the best way to explain it from my point of view.


What are you working on at the moment? Do you have a project on the go?

Currently I am working on my Senior Thesis, which pertains to documenting local natives in Sarasota, who have had life changing moments in their lives or those who are still facing these obstacles while trying to live a normal life. I wanted to steer away from my usual night imagery based upon my fascination with people. I like to people watch as it is called and imagine how their lives must be. This was my main motivation for going out and interviewing possible subjects for my thesis.


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Barnaby Hutchins

Where are you based?


Ghent, Belgium. I'm originally from Britain, though.



What equipment do you use?


That's changed a lot as I've gradually been able to afford better equipment. Eventually, I came to be using a Mamiya 7 and a Contax T2. And they are pretty much perfect. Especially the Mamiya, which is exactly as amazing as I'd always dreamed it would be. The Contax is with me all the time. The other day, I had to go into Brussels for a couple of hours, and when I realised I'd forgotten the Contax, I felt genuinely weird. Later, on the station platform, there were buildings coming out of the fog, a silver train, and a man looking at his shoes, all in a line. I looked on sadly.

I often use a Pentax 6x7 as well. It's another wonderful camera. Or rather, it has wonderful lenses. My Pentax body is falling to pieces. I almost always shoot everything on Kodak Portra. The new emulsions are awfully good.


What is your background in photography? How did you get into it?


My neighbour's boyfriend gave me a little 110 Kodak Brownie when I was about four or five. He was a mechanic, and it had a Ford logo and the name of the garage printed on it. After that, I don't remember stopping taking pictures as a kid. A few years later, I found my parents' old Zenit and started using that. My aunt and uncle were always interested in photography, and they taught me a lot. My uncle had a darkroom and showed me how to develop film and print. I kept taking pictures. They were never good. I was a kid, and I'd never much looked at pictures, somehow. I just liked taking them. When I was about twelve, I saved up to buy a little Russian medium format TLR. I took a lot of pictures with that, and with my uncle's Seagull that replaced it a couple of years later. And then, for some reason, I stopped. I suppose I lost interest. For a long time, I didn't take any photographs. Then, about five years ago, lots of things fell apart. And all I wanted to do was to take pictures. So I started again. And I started looking at as many photographs as I could. And since then, I haven't stopped.


What is your working process? Are your shots planned or spontaneous?


I walk around with a camera, and that's pretty much all. There have been a few times when I've seen something I wanted to photograph, but the light wasn't right, or something else was wrong, so I went back later. That's as close as I've ever come to planning. That's not a deliberate strategy exactly. Sometimes, I'd benefit from more planning. But I like spontaneity and surprise in the process, and some kind of discovery. I could probably take better looking photographs if I put more work into constructing them, but I'd rather limit my involvement. That thing that Tod Papageorge said about the inadequacy of imagination in comparison to the mad, swirling possibilities of the world – that sounds right.


A lot of your Photos have quite a minimal feel to them, is that something that you consciously look for?


Not consciously, no. Consciously, I really thought I was looking for complexity. But you're right! I guess I just keep failing. Minimalism is the kind of thing I'm naturally drawn to, admittedly. I like flat, blank spaces. If I could take a good picture of a white wall, I'd probably be happy. My problem with minimalism, though, is that if you actually want to produce something minimal, it's kind of easy, and it ends up being a cheap gimmick. And then it gets boring very quickly. So, I think, if what I'm looking for is complexity, and I fail, and end up with something minimal, that's pretty okay. At least there can be some tension there. Maybe it can work like that and not get boring. I hope so.




Who or what inspires you?


Honestly, it's a kind of panic. I really feel I have to save everything. I can't let things just go. It's completely stupid, but it's like trying to save the world. That's how it feels. If I see things line up in some way that works and I don't have a camera, I'll just stop and stare. It genuinely hurts if I let some little constellation of objects disappear.

But that's only one side of it: I take useless pictures if I don't look at other people's. I seriously love Takashi Homma. And Shomei Tomatsu was a huge influence on me. He was the first photographer whose work took my breath away. Doug DuBois has been important to me, although I'm not sure that influence is very apparent. And then there's Flickr and Tumblr. I think Flickr might be the most significant thing to happen to art photography so far this century. People denigrate it, but they shouldn't. Art develops in a context, and Flickr and Tumblr make a huge, aggregated context accessible. You can spend hours looking at great, new work every day. Access to that amount of work wasn't available before, unless you were one of the more important gallerists or curators. And there is some incredible work on Flickr (and Tumblr): Jeremy O'Sullivan, Mick van de Wiel, Andrés V, Thomas Albdorf, Alex Cretey-Systermans, Xiaopeng Yuan. Then there's my friend Neta Dror: we take very different kinds of pictures, but seem to understand each other's work. We critique each other, and that's good for inspiration.




Are you working on any kind of project at the moment?


Yes! There's a project called because, which I've been working on for about a year. The best work I've ever done is coming out of that project. There is a concept behind it, but if I try to talk about it I just sound obnoxious. So I'm going to keep quiet.

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Ye Rin Mok

Ye Rin Mok was born in Seoul, Korea in 1980 and moved to U.S when she was 12 years old. After earning her BA from University of California at Irvine in 2003, she's been contributing photos for publications such as Apartamento, Monocle, W and Wired. She currently resides and works in Los Angeles. 

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Sebastien Tixier

Where are you based?

Paris, France



What is your background in photography? How did you get started?

I’m self-taught. I came to photography late, 6 years ago when I finally bought my very first camera. Still, I’ve always been fascinated by photography since I was a child, but didn’t have the courage to start learning. I took some quick evening classes in drawing instead... But I kept being more fascinated by the photography medium because of its ambiguity: it might be visually realistic but yet it transcribes a bias. Thus when digital finally democratised I thought it was a great opportunity to start learning easily, and bought my first DSLR camera – I started with digital and went to film right after.



What equipment do you use?

I mostly use a medium format Mamiya RZ 67 for my personal work. A Canon 5D mk II for digital, that I also use to polaroid with. And some other film cameras 35mm and medium formats for special purposes.



What is your Creative Process, is your work planned or spontaneous?

It’s not an easy answer... I think my creative process is very different for each work. If I take for example the series “9288”, it went out very spontaneous. By nature it’s more a sort of “live photo report”, and it’s very different from my other works.

They share a more similar approach: generally I have something in mind that I want to turn into pictures, and start working on it. So it’s much more planned. But when I start, I quite never completely know everything it means to me; and it generally reveals over the months in the making of the series. Sometimes I will still discover things, years after it’s been finished! So I would rather describe the process as both planned and instinctive.

For example with “Ordinary Life Stories”, which are all stagings, I let the original idea grow for weeks and turn into an image all in my mind, mentally adding elements or changing the scene to add coherence/incoherence. Then I start sketching the image and see if it resists my thoughts for a few more weeks, to finally take the picture.

“Instant of Latencies” is somewhat in between: I found myself shooting some very similar kind of urban/landscape images for 3 years, until I actually understood the feeling they had in common and what felt important to me. So the series was then constructed by regrouping pictures from this period. Each picture is obviously not as planned as my stagings, but still most of them have not been taken “on a whim” but after identifications of the places and appropriate time for light.



Could you tell us a bit about your Ordinary Life series and 9288 (transsiberian) series? They are quite different in subject matter but have a similar stylistic quality. How did they both come about?

“9288” is indeed very different from my current other works. We decided to go through Siberia with another photographer friend in the mythic transsiberian train, from Moscow to Vladivostok. There weren’t many more plans at all, if any! The idea was basically to do the complete trip non-stop – it takes like 7/8 days – trying to capture the landscapes, mood and life, from the train through the window or on the platforms … and see what comes out. Of course sometimes it’s very frustrating not to be able to stop and explore a certain region that you see pass before your eyes, but doing the complete trip non-stop is just such a thrilling experience that not doing it would have been even more frustrating! There is a moment when you feel like you are part of the actual train.

“Ordinary Life Stories” is quite the exact opposite in terms of “process”. Each picture in this series is very planned and sketched first. This series actually went out as a collection of mini-series: I had first been working on some pictures originally planned to be separated (first the photos with the red wires, then those with the stars) and realized they were all talking about some similar things, so I decided to regroup them under the name “Ordinary Life Stories”. And the series was then extended with more photos. This work is much more “conceptualised”, it deals with our relationship with ourselves, our bodies, our experience, the doubts, hopes or disillusions that we carry.



Who or what inspires you?

Pretty much everything that affects or touches me, be it encounters, emotions or life conditions. Generally speaking, humanity with its cracks and poetry is what I want to represent, and more precisely so far my work mostly tends to present this as a general questioning about our urbanization and our physical or psychological isolation.

Speaking about influences, I think that David Lynch’s aestheticism has certainly been a great inspiration for me, and a lot of photographers of course. In random order, I would think of the works of Gregory Crewdson, Nadav Kander, Stephen Shore, Erwin Olaf … and a lot more obviously! I am continuously looking at images, in magazines, in the streets, on the web, from famous and unknown artists. Also the static and “overacted” poses of the models in Renaissance paintings are probably related to the way I often direct my models to.



What are you working on at the moment?

I think the series “Ordinary Life Stories” is not over yet, but for now I’ve started working on a new project: it isn’t titled yet but I can introduce it as a series that also has a conceptual approach, but with a repetitive pattern in the framing. Though the series is shot in colour, the aesthetic is stripped down to mostly only black and white items, and alternating stagings with models and still-life pictures. I am at the very early stage of this work so I still don’t know what it all means to me, but it’s probably focusing a little bit more on growing-up, the regrets and expectations it carries. On a very different approach, I have also started shooting scenes of urban/rural scenes at a large scale that I think are related, but right know I have no idea where it will bring me! Lots to do!

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