This month I wandered blindly into being 35 years old. I feel like this is midlife crisis territory. I looked it up in the Bible via Quora but quote unquote the “…span of our life is 70 years, Or 80 if one is especially strong. But they are filled with trouble and sorrow etc etc…”
Just kidding, I don’t know if I’d describe myself as especially strong but life is good and I’m happy to be here.
Anyway, this week I’d like to share one photo for every year that I’ve been shooting them, which is 14.12
2010
When I got my first camera I lived for surfing and skating, and that’s pretty much the only thing I photographed. My aspirations were definitely not highbrow, and I was too sheltered to know about the lowbrow ones yet.
2011
To celebrate graduating university a few friends and I went to Zanzibar. This was my first time taking my camera on the road. Highlights from this trip include blasting the poor vendors of a night market with all the oomf my little speedlight could muster and shooting through my sunglasses to make everything look sepia.
2012
I worked as a bellboy at the Ritz in America for a couple months, and if I wasn’t snowboarding (first half of the trip) or nursing a broken collarbone (second half of the trip) I was photographing pretty much everything. I shot a few bands (including The Wailers(!), who looked cold and out of place in the snow), a lot of dead trees and the X Games.
2013
This was the year I moved to Korea and began finding my feet photographically. I can be a bit of a slow learner but this place is so visually intriguing, and I’m very grateful that it was here I got to build up my taste in photography.
2014*
This year was a big one for travel photos. I visited Japan, Hong Kong and Shanghai, and felt very cosmopolitan.
*The email version of this left out 2014 entirely. Whoops!
2015
It was around this time I first heard the term ‘Street Photography'. I came up loving cameras and visuals, but not at all steeped in photography culture. I think that made my early arc a little slower than it could have been, but hey, no biggie.
2016
In early 2016 I walked into a camera shop, meekly put two years of cash savings on the counter and pointed at what would be my first full-frame camera. Sometime in the previous 6 months I’d gotten this idea that I could make money from photography, and taking myself seriously for the first time, I figured I’d give it a go.
It was around this time I saw the potential of working in fashion here. Some friends and I would organize free shoots for brands just to get experience and build a portfolio. We had zero idea of what we were doing, but these were some of the funnest shoots of my life. The picture above was shot for a friend’s brand in Hong Kong. We shot around 10 shirts, each one in a different location around the city, over about a week. We got to keep the shirts.
2017
By 2017 enough jobs had come through to pay for the camera, and then some.
2018
But 2018 threw a few curveballs. For several years I’d been trying to figure out a way to work in Korea without going down the normal route of qualifying through Korea’s points-based system. I won’t go deep into that now (I made a vid about it if you’re interested) but this path was and is daunting, demanding long hours of Korean study and examination. Worse than that, it meant I’d have to shelve working in photography, and go back to teaching while I worked on the visa. This was a tough one for me, but I realized the best route to where I wanted to be was the long and official one. I grew up a bit in 2018.
It was around then that my now-wife Kelly cropped up for the first time in my increasingly 35mm photos. She was and still is the antidote to my gloomies.
2019
Not one to take a punch lying down (I mean, who would?), I figured if I couldn’t be working in photography for a bit, I’d find other ways to push myself photographically. That’s how I came to make Never in a Month of Sundays, my first failed photo project. This, er, ambitious project will get its own newsletter one day, but very quickly I shot a different style/theme/concept every month for a year while working Monday to Friday, meeting a Korean tutor twice a week after work and attending two separate Korean classes, one of which was 9 hours every Saturday. I basically did the whole project on Sunday afternoons.
I actually did finish shooting it, but I had the gall to announce to everyone I was going to print the whole lot in this unbound book thing and that I would be selling it the following year. That never happened. The project’s similarities to Serial Music are noted and I’d appreciate it if neither of us paid them any mind.
2020
Come 2020 I had my freshly minted visa in hand3 and what looked for a second there like none of my old clients. That coupled with a global apprehensiveness about all the coughing made for a less chill ‘welcome back’ than I’d expected, but you know, the world doesn’t revolve around me I guess. Korea was one of the few places that functioned fairly normally throughout the pandemic, and little by little I found some new brands to work with, some old relationships were reforged, and I was a working photographer again.
One of the new clients was a select shop in a city south of Seoul. I made one of my first videos about working there. It was a demanding job, they needed a fully new concept every other week and I had a very limited time to produce the images. Still, it pushed me to try new things and I was grateful for the regular work.
2021
I’ve written here about how I closed out 2021 feeling like my personal photography needed a change. I picked up a Nikon F6 and went looking for something new. I’ve included the photo above because it was shot in my old style on my new camera, and it marked a kind of right angle in what I’d be photographing next.
2022
I treated 2022 as an opportunity to explore just what could work photographically. I shot everything and I shot a lot of it. Many of the images from this time don’t work, but I love seeing them all together. They show just how I was searching for something new, and how slowly but surely I found it. Most of the images for Serial Music were produced during this time, and when you see the booklets I’m going to make, I’m betting it’ll show.
2023
Come 2023 I turned my photographs inward a bit, and started looking for ways to make them feel more personal. Oddly enough, photographing the familiar felt like unfamiliar territory. I’d largely kept a sense of myself absent from my photos up until this point, and it was a really good new challenge to find ways to personalize them.
2024
I started this year with a photo-a-day that’s sort of running in the background while I chip away at Serial Music and one or two other projects. The photo above is from the day I turned 35. I hope this newsletter provides a bit of a snapshot of what it’s like to grow in photography. If you’re anything like me, it’s not a straight path, but it’s endlessly fulfilling.
Cheers,
Chris
I got my first camera on my 21st birthday, which is a significant birthday in South Africa. It’s kind of like a Sweet 16 in America, but 21.
Mercifully I don’t have to go into my hard drives to find the photos because at 21 I also started storing all my photos on Flickr. I might not be cool, but I’m effective.
I was so psyched that I nearly crashed my motorbike leaving immigration, drove to work where I put in my notice and dropped my phone cracking the screen. I was free, baby!
Happy birthday, Chris!