fts Destination Fiordland
Hannah Kuo is one of those people you fortunate to have in your life. I have rewritten the intro to this interview quite possibly a dozen times now & nothing seemed to fit right. So I reread the interview & realized that I just need to let her speak for herself. Please enjoy.
Empty Stretch: Age, Where you are from, Things you enjoy
Hannah Kuo: I am 23 as of right now in 2012, born in Taipei, Taiwan. Relocated to Beijing when I was four and spent 14 ridiculous years there. Moved to New York in 2006 to strive for my paper approval of legitimacy in Photography at Parsons. It’s been a year and a half and I still haven’t received it in the mail… yet. I enjoy Tetris, food, online dating, sporting, traveling (who doesn’t?), googling things, and playing with cats.
ES: How did you get into photography/ start taking pictures?
HK: My dad handed me my first digital camera in 1998, a Sony MVC-FD7 Mavica (the ones that you put a 3.5” floppy disk in for storage, remember?) for no particular reason. I started bringing it to school to photograph my friends and you know… just the usual school life. After a while I decided to create a website to showcase those photos, it ran for quite a few years with different photographic mediums (35mm film/disposable cameras, slightly more advanced digital cameras, webcam pics, scanned photographs submitted by other people… etc) until the popular girls started asking me to make separate sections dedicated to themselves. Since then, I’ve just always carried a camera of any sort with me wherever I went.
fts It Was Fun While It Lasted
ES: Your photographic work covers a huge swath of the medium. You have polaroids & snapshots & then well lit & formally composed in studio portraits & then coneceptual based black & white work. Has one thing led to another or does the project demand a certain format? How do you decide what gets photographed how?
HK: Each project demands a certain format. When I shoot with my 6×7 camera (Greetings, Destination Fiordland, It Was Romance…), my structure is more formal and I become fixated on everything that is within the frame. In these photographs I intended to create something for the viewer. When I shoot with my 35mm point and shoot, I am more casual and involved with everything else that’s happening outside of the frame, therefore in these photographs, the viewer would be creating an experience with me. Though, my decision for how things get photographed is sometime unconscious. The polaroids were to entertain my grandma with instant gratification, which I later learned that they were too small for her to see.
fts USA Younguns
ES: That leads to the question of what is your general working process? I have spent enough time with you to know you always have a camera on you. Do you shoot & then decide direction or do you think of projects & then fulfill them?
HK: I usually have several different projects going on. My diary is an ongoing project, though while I am shooting and editing for my diary, some photographs collectively turn into another prospective project — so in this case I would say it is kind of a mixture of both. Some personal projects I am still slowly working on… those are the ones that I just can’t make up my mind about. I then consider those as my “long term” projects…
fts Roots
fts USA Younguns II
ES: You went to school for photography & work at a representation gallery/firm how have those affected your view of the medium?
HK: Going to school for photography definitely polished up my technical skills, which then greatly allowed me to leave most technical aspects behind in order to comfortably focus on the subject matter. Working at a representation firm showed me how the industry is operated — beyond being behind the lens — and confirmed the term, as I re-quote my co-worker quoting Wu-Tang, “C.R.E.A.M – Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”
fts Joey Grandma
ES: In a world so saturated with photographs & photographers, what keeps you making photos?
HK: I have terrible memory so if I don’t make photographs, I won’t remember anything.
To see more of Hannah’s work please visit her website & also follow her diary.