— Have You Heard

What do Haitian orphans,

Spiderman and Annie Liebowitz

all have in common?  They are

part of the fabric of Felix Kunze’s

photography.  Bouncing from

city to city, Felix opts for experience

over stability as he finds his footing

as a young photographer.

So you have been working in New York City for the last few months, what were you up to before

coming to the city?

A short version of my life from early 2010 to the point where I arrived in New York would go something like this:
I spent the end of January to March in Haiti, Berlin, London, LA & New York, staying about 5 days in each location at a time on various projects, including “The Future of Haiti Project”, an orphanage I was involved with after the earthquake in Haiti.
My early summer was spent in Florida, where I shot a bunch of portraiture and commercial work.
After that it was flitting between London and Denmark to cover a variety of music festivals and fashion events for Getty Images and an amazing publication called Festival Annual, they document festival culture in the UK.  I also did a bunch of portraiture, got involved in some theatre projects and had some time off.

How did you find a job assisting for Annie Leibowitz?  What are you hoping to get out of working in her

studio?

I was introduced to the people at Annie’s by a photographer friend during a stop over in New York after one of my Haiti trips in Feb 2010. I inquired about an internship, much to my surprise they took me on. I’ve been interning there ever since. It’s an experience that has helped me in countless ways, I’d have trouble verbalizing all the things I’ve learned. Primarily it has given me an understanding of the breadth of Annie’s work and the artistic integrity and independence required to produce a worthwhile body of work.
The ability to mix a high level of professionalism and structured approach with artistic freedom is essential when you get to her level – it’s been very interesting to be a part of that, even on the sidelines.

What can a young photographer learn from working on high end magazine shoots?

There really is no giant different between a small or big shoot. The big shoots, the ones with a lot of lights, lots of assistants and all sorts of other gizmos – these shoots are different not because of the equipment but because the people that work on them know what they are doing. From the photographer on down, when you get into a big shoot, you know that everyone knows what they are doing.

By practicing a bit, by shooting a lot and by generally having a long term interest in the subject, you can probably pick up 75 percent of what you need to know in photography. The other 25 percent are gained by years and years of experience and having the right people working for you. A team with centuries of experience between then ends up making up that other 25 percent and you end up with the kind of photography that a photo editor will put on the cover of their international magazine. It’s quite stunning to see a giant shoot come together. The mix of professionalism and art again becomes evident.

What do you see as the difference between a photographer who charges $800 a day and one who

charges $40,000 a day?

Really, I think it is about the level of experience and technical knowledge. Someone who’s been at this for a while, who’s kept themselves interested, has pushed themselves and has worked their fingers to the bone for the love of photography, who’s able to put a team together and is technically proficient is a boon to clients. You can depend on that person to turn out great work. It’s as simple as that. If you hire one of the top photographers in the world, you know what you are getting. You can’t quite be so sure with someone who’s starting out. For higher budget shoots, you are paying for advertising rights and all sorts of other licensing comes into play, so there really is no valid dollar to dollar comparison.

When you decide to assist for a photographer, how do you determine whether it was a successful

experience?

Every photographer is different, every photographer creates a unique atmosphere on set, everyone has their own vision. Every time I assist I am surprised and delighted at methods used to create an image. The experience is almost universally positive.

What photographers have influenced your work?

In recent months, Annie’s has understandably had a big influence on me. I’ve been working with Lara Jade from the UK, she’s made an impact on me. Thorsten Overgaard, a fantastic Leica shooter from Denmark, has been a mentor of sorts, he’s been an inspiration. There’s a lot of others but these guys have really kicked it with me.

Recently you started a community of young photographers called “Inspire.”  What was the motivation

to assemble a group of “Up and Comers” in the photo industry?

Inspire is a project that Lara Jade and I started in March 2010. We were both getting huge amounts of requests for help from young photographers, trying to find out how to break into the industry. It’s a hard question to answer, everyone has to find their own way. We felt that we had both gained enormously by simply speaking to people, asking the silly questions you aren’t supposed to ask and feeling our way through the rest of the journey. We wanted to encourage up and coming photographers to talk to each other, collaborate and share experiences. We wanted them to inspire each other. The same way Lara has inspired me, the way Annie’s books and work have inspired me, there’s a place for bringing people together, showing each other their work and talking about it.

I’ll use Magnum Photos as an example, the agency is a huge collaboration, in it’s infancy, photographers would sit around studying each other’s contact sheets and talk about each other’s work. It’s a huge boon to be able to get feedback from someone who knows what they are talking about, who’s had some of the same experiences. It’s a big deal.

What happens when you put forty, like minded, photographers under the age of thirty together?

When we did our first inspire meet-up in London in March 2011, we ended up with a huge amount of excitement between people who met up and have things in common. We’ve had stories of collaborations between those guys since, which is hugely uplifting and is the whole point of Inspire.

A few months ago you went to Haiti to experience the damage of the earth quake.  What was it like

shooting in an emergency zone?  How does an experience like Haiti influence your future work?

My two trips to Haiti (one at the end of Jan 10 and one in Feb 10) were both borne out of a desire to get an idea of the place for myself. It was a huge news story and I never felt I got the whole picture by just watching the news. So I self-funded a trip over there and had a look around. It was tough but amazing. I ended up connecting with an amazing orphanage project down there, work that’s now being continued by an organization called Help for Orphans. They had put together an orphanage out of three collapsed orphanages and amidst all the devastation, despair, protests, dying and unrest, the orphanage was a hugely positive place to work with. It was the orphanage that got me to come back in February, I shot a whole story on the work the orphanage was doing at the time.

Shooting in a disaster zone is an experience unlike anything else. In a way it’s so easy because on every corner there’s a collapsed building, someone displaced by the earthquake or some form of devastation. And at the same time it’s the hardest thing to photograph because you are really looking for a cohesive story. When there’s so much going on, it’s hard not to get distracted by it all. But how do you piece a story together? That’s the challenge. Getting involved with the orphanage was a blessing, it enabled me to get involved with one project and tell it’s story – it brings a feeling of containment to my work there. Without it, I think I would have come back with nothing that says anything.
I did photograph a bunch of what was going on around Port-Au-Prince, in between working with the Orphanage. I was focusing on trying to put across what the place is like, I didn’t have an assignment as such, I valued the freedom. I couldn’t think how to put it across in a simple photo essay so instead I made two videos with several hundred images and voice annotated them, stuck them on my website and hoped to tell a story like that. I got some interesting feedback, I think because I didn’t have a news angle or a story to sell, I just kind of told of my experiences and tried to convey what little I knew about the complexity of the situation.
I’d still like to figure out a way to present what I saw in Haiti in a cohesive picture essay, rather than describing a bunch of images verbally. It’s something that I feel is needed now, a year after the event – but I’m still struggling with how to tell such a complex story in a limited number of images.

How did you decide to photograph an orphanage while you were in Haiti?  Did the project go as

planned or did it evolve on a daily basis?

The orphanage project was both incredible exhausting and rewarding. We had originally booked a hotel in Port-au-Prince but soon got tired of the endless driving around and not being close enough – so we voted to set up at the orphanage itself and I grabbed a sleeping bag and slept in one of the corridors of the main building on the orphanage compound. I kept my equipment in the one locked room and tried to make sense of the situation.

It definitely evolved a great deal as time went by. Apart from the fact that every day was a struggle of where to find supplies, food, medicine for the kids, we had some amazing support. A medical team came one day from Mexico to do dental work on the kids – another day a team came to plant up some food for self-sufficiency. One night I was sitting huddled on the floor on my laptop, going through the days work, when I heard drumming outside. A bunch of the older boys had organized an impromptu jam session using buckets and sticks while the girls were dancing. It was at night, we had no electricity but we were able to set up some battery powered lights and take some shots.
The biggest challenge was getting the kids to stop noticing me. I would sit in on a school class for 1/2 hour, just waiting for the kids to stop playing up for the camera. It happened eventually but I couldn’t help but feel I was distracting the class.
One of the projects that the orphanage staff were very keen on was taking a portrait of each kid. They were trying to figure out how to get the kids in front of a nice backdrop, shaded from the sun, cleaned up a bit, wearing clean clothing, etc. This was when the orphanage was still in temporary accommodation, placed haphazardly in an old scrapyard. The kids had one canopy with a bench under it on which they sat to eat and a well with a filter system provided water. There was also some tents provided by relief organizations and that was about it. So after all this back and forth of how we’d photograph these portraits I decided that I would shoot them as is – in the sun, with dust on their faces and with whatever they were wearing at the time. These kids really were well off in comparison to the post-earthquake mess. They had food, water, medical attention and a dry place to sleep, but in those early days that was about it. I tried to get each kid to smile. Some had just lost their parents and weren’t in the mood for smiling, so I took their picture as it was. We had a special needs kid, I took his picture and worried about it because he didn’t look as cute and nice as the other kids. He didn’t want to open his eyes against the glaring sun. We had the kids hold boards with their name & age on it. I cried because some of the kids didn’t know their age; that made me really sad. In the end it turned out to be perfect, it was representative of the dire need for sponsorships, for funds and help for the orphanage. The special needs boy was one of the first to be adopted, a great result.

Your work seems to be quite inclusive.  I have seen you shoot celebrities, festival, and reportage. Is it

important to develop a specific style within a genre or do you prefer to shoot a broad range of work?

I consider myself to be strong in two areas – Editorial portraiture and atmospheric coverage of events. I’ve done photojournalistic work, I shoot music and fashion events for fun and I do the occasional commercial project. I view myself to be travelling on two main avenues, portraiture & documentary work, which includes projects like Haiti and India. The development of my career is bringing these two avenues ever closer, they will at some point merge. Then there’s little paths that go off on the sides, mostly for fun projects. The future is what I’d call documentary portraiture.

What type of questions do you wish people asked about your images?

I want to help increase knowledge. That’s my basic impetus. While I wish everyone understood the situation in Haiti, it isn’t practical for every human being on planet earth to travel there and see it for themselves. Media from Haiti is the 2nd best thing to being there. If I can show someone something about Haiti or a person I photograph, something they didn’t know before, I’ve done my job right.

The process of photography is filled with making mistakes, were there any mistakes you have made

that proved to be invaluable lessons?

Absolutely. I made tons of mistakes, I still make a lot of mistakes and I hope I keep making mistakes. Some of my best images came about because I made a mistake. It is one of the best ways to learn.

Whose photography work interests you right now?

I’m intrigued by modern photojournalism and the editorialization of fashion, in that people are trying to get a story out of every picture. The ubiquity of war photography is amazing, we are in an era when great war photography can get distributed within hours of being shot. The same applies in other fields. The move towards digital and less fragmentation in the difference between camera models has moved photography to being more about composition and subject matter, it’s an interesting development.

Each city has its particular charms and advantages. How does New York function differently than say,

your home town of London?

There’s so many subtle cultural differences, it would really be a hard question to answer. Photographically, there’s certainly more going on here in New York than in London.

You seem to spend a decent amount of time traveling around the world.  How does traveling improves

the quality of your work?

To me, traveling has been about understanding what’s going on in the world, how our socio-economic environment affects our daily lives, how the rich-poor divide impacts life in the western world, things like that. Haiti specifically taught me that it’s more important to tell the story than to create artistic images, especially when trying to document something. You kind of have to let the style flow while still telling the story. it’s the breadth of my experiences around the world that have really helped me get an idea of what stories actually mean. I don’t look at the news in the same way, because I’ve seen a lot.

Can you describe your most memorable meal on the road?

I was on a motorbike trip through Europe in May 2008, we had just done a long day of riding in the rain and had finally arrived at a camp site about 100 miles outside of Florence in Italy. We asked the receptionist at the camp site for a local restaurant, preferably where no-one speaks English. It was the best meal of my life, cost about 10 euros and was perfect after we’d been drenched in rain all day.

If you would like to see more of Felix Kunze’s work, visit his website, Facebook, and Twitter below:

www.felixkunze.com

www.Facebook.com/felixkunzephoto

www.twitter.com/felixkunze

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