The Language of Movement - an interview with photographer Kim-Leng Hills

I decided it was time to interview some photographers and find out what drives them to take pictures. The compelling image below is by Kim-Leng Hills whose personal story is an inspiration, as is her work.

What or who got you in to taking photographs ?

I was about 16 and was working my way towards being an illustrator,  I was obsessed with drawing and had just been accepted at at the century old Byam Shaw School of Art. I loved observing people, situations, life, everything around me. I'd get my friends to model for me, and I'd see if I could draw them as precisely and quickly as possible using inks. My Dad gave me his 1970's Cosina SLR and I would sneak out of school to go venturing with a friend of mine round the whole of North Kent, photographing onto Ilford film as we went. When the film had been processed, I'd then turn them into illustration infused images. Drawing over photographs with inks.

I also had an obsession with Jackson Pollock. I used to take the train to London to sit at the Tate and stare at 'Summertime Number 9A' seeing if I could find something new about it the longer I stared at it. I loved how Pollock would devote his mind into the language of movement and lines, completely creating ground-breaking work that had never been seen before. It was seeing a black and white photograph captured of him by photographer Hans Namuth that triggered my passion for Photo-documentary. As soon as I got my first debit card, I bought a Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock painting in his barn.

What sparks your imagination and inspires you ?

MUSIC! My Dad worked on the pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, and as a child I grew up listening to a wide variety of music and playing the piano, violin and the guitar. If you'd asked me who my favourite band was when I was 7, you would've gotten "The Mamas & Papas, Queen, Holst, Elgar and Debussy" as an answer. In my head, they all went together. So music has always been there as a lifeline for me throughout my entire life.

My Dad. As I've grown older, I've discovered more of his work he's kept hidden and not really shouted about. Turns out he loved making his own films and had produced a series of super-8 films of life in Malaysia when he'd met my Mum, and had put his own music to the footage. His photographic work is also incredible. Finding gems like these that have allowed me to learn more about my family over the years has definitely inspired me to keep going with my own work.

I could list a vast number of Photographic artists who inspire me, but if anything, its the people that I meet who inspire me the most. I teach full-time at the moment too, so surrounding myself with 11 to 18 year olds is one of the most inspirational places I've had the joy of being in for 12 hours a day!

The last exhibition you saw that you'd recommend ?

The last Photography exhibition I went to was Tom Stoddart's 78 Perspectives at London Riverside last Summer. Each image either made me want to weep or gave me goose-bumps.  Photo-documentary can create a huge impact when used in the right way. I ended up orbiting this exhibition for about an hour; the work was mesmerising and most definitely life affirming.

What projects are you working on now ? 

Currently, my life revolves around teaching full-time at a new Creative Media secondary school in London. On the weekends or evenings, I'm working on composing the score and sound design for a new theatre production by Alex Gwyther called 'Our Friend The Enemy' based on the Christmas Truce.

Photography-wise, I am often over in Devon with EarFilms helping document the development of their beautiful story-telling company.  I co-run a non profit organisation known as Art Is The Cure.

What has photography taught you ?

That photography can start mass community projects, and is an excellent way to challenge yourself. Through photography I have achieved dreams I've never thought would happen, such as making a book with Kevin Spacey and Steve Lazarides, meeting and working alongside Eddie Izzard, or giving lectures for the Tate Galleries.

Film or digital ?

Film. It's organic. The process of having to develop your own prints connects the photographer to the entire 'way' of photography. Generations miss the opportunity to know what it's like to have to wait. I teach students that once upon a time, we used to have to wait a week before we could see our images.

What matters most to you, how a photo looks or how it how it makes you feel ?

Both. When I photograph something, the image will come across a hell of a lot stronger if I've connected to the subject in the first place. It's why I love photographing live performance more than I do Fashion or Commercial. If the subject is interacting with the camera, if they are in their element, a moment where they're staring off into space, or reflecting any essence of themselves, then the image will be powerful. Technique can dance around how the subject 'performs', with practice; the technical side of things becomes second nature, and your brain and fingers and doing everything without you having to think about it. All you care about is coining the Decisive Moment as Henri Cartier Bresson so perfectly put it. The most powerful images can often come about completely unexpectedly.

Can photography heal ?

The notion to 'heal' can possibly mean to resolve something, or to perhaps create a sense of inner peace or calm. I strongly believe that photography can do that. For a start, it makes you stop, shut up, and just look, right? It makes you study something in detail and it also evokes some form of emotion.  Take a look at Tom Stoddart's work for example; it's shot with the purpose of finding beauty within the pain. Then there's someone like Gregory Crewdson who will get an entire neighbourhood to create a photographic scene, working with these people for however long the project takes.

Photography has helped me face my own self-doubts. During times of great suffering I have picked up my camera, climbed mountains and battled hail storms. It has taken me to where Ansel Adams found his inspiration, made me really stop and look. And feel. And put the camera down.

In what ways is photography exploitative of its subject matter ?

I remember when I first started working with the incredible teens at Teens Unite Fighting Cancer. These amazing people were dealing with life-limiting illnesses and teaching me so much about life and what they go through every day. Then there were strangers I met on the street, be it workers or the homeless. I was constantly inspired and wanted to begin a guerrilla project of plastering their faces on walls during the night, so that when the people of London awoke, they would suddenly see faces of ordinary people looking over the city. I wanted to share their stories and call it "Invisible Heroes". I had the backing of ITV in collaboration with my organisation Art Is The Cure  and it was one of the first projects [my Director] Rich and I wished to do about 3 years ago, but eventually fell through simply because of the idea of 'exploitation'. I  wanted to show the fact that we all struggle, we all have our stories to tell.

How well can photography depict the truth and/or expand our knowledge of a world we do not know and have not seen ?

Take Jeff Wall for example -- how he cleverly gets actors to re-enact scenes, or to create false moments, but photographs them in such a way that they seem genuine and/or following what conforms to a Decisive Moment. It simply underlines the fact that we can so easily take a photograph as truth regardless of it being manipulated. I am constantly fascinated by impermanence and the fact that everything is constantly changing. Photographs can be said to capture 'evidence' of what something looks like, or once looked like, in order to educate us of what is 'fact' and what is 'fiction'. Because we can see it, we tend to believe it.

Finally, please complete this sentence 'I love taking photographs because.....'

I love taking photographs because I love going into another world and feeling a part of me become 'freed'. When I first started getting into photography, I realised I fell in love with being able to spot things other people usually missed. It's why I loved Street Photography so much. I could easily walk around unnoticed and capture things with a telephoto lens, or a fixed 50mm, and get images of situations or moments that no one else had realised was going on. Then when you look at the image for even longer, you suddenly notice other parts about it too. I think part of me is drawn to capturing the human spirit; what keeps us alive, what keeps us buzzing, and how we treat ourselves and each other. Maybe that's what draws me to photographing the devastating and beautiful aspects of human life. From professional dancers, straight through to famous artists, or a random act of kindness.

Looking at Daylight - an interview with photographer Aaron Graubart

I decided it was time to interview some photographers and find out what drives them to take pictures. First up is New York based photographer, Aaron Graubart, whose immaculate image you can see below.

What or who got you in to taking photographs ? Are there any specific life events that drew you to it initially ?

When I was a small child, David Attenborough’s “Life On Earth” TV series and accompanying books made me want to be a wildlife photographer. My first photographs were taken with my fathers camera in the garden, trying to photograph plants and insects. My first successful photograph was of a friend’s dog, Wilbur,  lying on a bed on a white blanket. I was struck by how the sunlight coming through the window lit the folds in the blanket. I guess I’ve been taking essentially the same photograph over and over again ever since.

What sparks your imagination and inspires you ?

Paintings, Drawings, Books, Films, Looking at daylight and how it behaves, rarely other photographers.

Film or digital ?

The important thing is the image - how it was made is irrelevant to me.

What matters most to you, how a photo looks or how it how it makes you feel ?

If a photograph isn’t intensely beautiful (whatever that means) it is unlikely to make me feel much of anything at all.

Finally, please complete this sentence 'I love taking photographs because.....

I love taking photographs because it makes me feel useful.

Living Differently - Terror in the Body

This is a photograph I took a few months ago of my bed. The title, 'Home', will hopefully mean something to the thousands like me who live with chronic illness and spend a lot of time housebound. The idea for this blog has been floating around my head for some time but I was reluctant to put finger to keyboard and write it. So much of my conversations these days seem to begin with the phrase 'since becoming ill...' and if I was bored by this opening gambit I could pretty much be assured that others would be too.

I have a variety of diagnoses - Lyme Disease, Chronic Fatigue/M.E and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. On top of that I have lived with depression in varying degrees most of my adult life. Looking at this comely list I immediately sink in to shame. Although I know it's not my fault that this has happened to me I cannot help feeling I have been invaded by positive thinking body snatchers and should just pull myself together. Needless to say I would never judge others this harshly but there it is, the protestant work ethic leaking in to my daily thoughts and the idea that if I just tried harder I could magic myself well.

Thankfully I have learnt a number of techniques to counteract this tsunami of self-blame, one of the most helpful being a beginner's mindfulness. Even if it is for moments only I investigate my feelings thoroughly, where (if anywhere) they are located in my body and try to find words to describe the sensations. At that moment I become both the observer and the observed and it can give me a fleeting sense of freedom. But what really works is having a continuing creative process and, as I have written elsewhere on this blog, photography has been a bigger help than I could have ever imagined when I very first picked up a camera as a teenager.

2012 was a tough year. It is hard to describe the grieving process of becoming ill with no (immediate) hope of getting better. Everything changes. My life before my current state was not an endless fairground ride of jollity and excitement but I was unaware of how much freewill I possessed. Now my stamina and energy are so low I have become the flakey friend I often used to feel intolerant of. Every arrangement, from making my bed, having a friend over for half an hour, on bad days even cooking myself a meal - can be cancelled at the last minute. I live this new life in pencil, not pen.

Once I could earn my own living and as much as I would like to say this did not impact on my self-worth having to depend on benefits can make me feel infantilised. In short my independence, of both thought and action, was something that were so tightly wound to my identity that losing these to the degree I have feels like a living bereavement.

I am homesick for what I now feel is my 'old life'. Even though I know I am romanticising a past which almost certainly did not exist the way I paint it. I came to realise that my experience of depression was a help to me. I had already encountered such feelings of despair, ones I thought I would never flee but somehow miraculously did. I knew this landscape well, how utterly convincing it was that there would be no sunlight again after the dark night fell. Also, and I cannot emphasise this enough, therapy helped. Therapy really helped.

I had a hunch there was a through-line in my life experience. That's where I got the title of this blog. I have always been scared, on some level. Sometimes I have managed to muffle that fear with frantic activity, over-eating, sex, or any number of fleeting distractions and encounters. Now I live with an illness with an unsure prognosis, in a country where benefits for the sick are being eroded and, for good measure, having to move out of my beloved home of 20 years plus, fear is not something I can bury any longer. The foundations really are crumbling.

But this is not new. I never felt at home in myself, or to the degree I wished for, in the world out there. I have always been afraid of something, of a future where the sky falls, of people I love and depend upon dying, of not being able to survive. And although there are many days I hate my illness with an acidic intensity I realise I also have a begrudging gratitude for what it has offered me. I no longer have to wear a mask. It has been torn from me and I can now face the terror. There is no where left to hide. And this, at long last, is where I begin my journey.

The Rain Room

In a moment of utter madness I tweeted that I would write a poem on any subject given to me - it being National Poetry Day. My friend Claire suggested I write about "Your subject: Scandinavian witches who'd sell wind to sailors. Artists make indoor rain room." This is for her and it's a freewrite.

The Rain Room

Singing about always taking the weather with you is all good but what about those

of us who travel light. No umbrellas, nothing as considered as walking shoes

and even our swimwear will dissolve in the sea. Instead we look to our elders.

Women who carried nothing more than a spell or two under their hats,

whose idea of magic was escaping rain even when it fell through the ceiling.

Storms mean nothing to witches who can sing their way to a brighter day.

The Inheritance

Another 5 minute freewrite but this time in response to my friend Musa Okwonga's poem 'Mortal'. I read it this morning and was struck by the lines There is nothing worse/ Than to be an ambition who has lost its thirst. I knew I had to put something down. Musa is a man rich in talent and this is my way of thanking him for all that he gives to the world. My piece below is very much about my dad who, like Musa, was never short of a word or two.

The Inheritance

He left me his books, the weight of the universe and so many unread words that I struggled to hold all of them - ignored, forgotten, featureless.

Instead I carried his name. Some places I travelled to it meant something, transformed me from anonymous in to a named being. And, for moments, I even felt a fleeting sense of love.

Now their spines shuffle together on a high shelf, fidgeting in their jackets. Their glorious moment passed and all I have left is the recollection of the day he handed them on to me. And his name. I carry that mouthing it in to the speechless dark waiting for an echo that never comes.

A Necessary Season

I am a big fan of impulsive acts of creativity. The poem below is a freewrite. I set the timer to 5 minutes and just sat there and allowed the words to spill on to the page. It's a thank you poem to my flatmate and reading it you will probably gather why. It's so easy to get overtaken with ideas of perfection and what a finished piece of work looks like. I think it's a good idea to stray away from that occasionally and, like the juice in the piece below, acquaint ourselves with the raw.

A Necessary Season

Is it a cliche to talk about how this autumn wind makes the leaves and branches dance ?

I watch the seduction, and see them swoon when being kissed so gently.

It's the time of year for the yellowing of leaves, for falling down. I remember last night's silver handshake moon - a harvest.

At the kitchen table we drank carrot and sweet potato juice warmed with root ginger and cardamon. You looked at me in that practiced way of yours, as I took another sip of September and tasted how not quite sweet it was.

We'd finally cracked a perfect taste. I smiled. But your mind was on other things. 'Let's face it - you know when someone loves you.' Earlier you had held me so close I no longer needed to cry for help.

But even this is a fiction. You told me the story of love long before my tears and we drank our juice some time between my guttural release and you holding me.

The order does not matter. What I tasted was the beginnings of a friendship and how the trees need a little push to nudge them from summer and in to this necessary season.

Picture This – Naomi Woddis ‘How Light Falls’

Many superlative writers responded to a portfolio of my photography for a project called Picture This. I also worked with photographer and film-maker Craig Thomas, on a short film entitled Still Life, containing a selection of these images. Below is my contribution. At first I was reluctant to write a poem and, to be honest, the poem came before the photograph but I hope that the glaring sky with its scudding clouds is an apt partnering for my words.

How Light Falls

In between the spaces, more spaces. How light falls here. But not here. And how shadows have their own words for things even time cannot explain -

Here it ends. Here it begins again. Here it ends. And so on.

We can learn a lot from the language of light. Or those so ill they cannot recall anything other than this, and what breath and blinking means to those who cannot even carry air in their palms.

The cry of coupling foxes sounds worse to me than it does for them, or a cat wanting breakfast. Even the gulls cry is misleading.

Like all the photographs ever taken what looks like an edge, a beginning, a story is nothing more than a wish for something that has passed.

We cannot hold on to much anyway. I learnt this late on in the day.

What sounds like a shout could be a victory, the yell of defeat, or nothing at all.

Light falls here, and here. Darkness, shadow. Everything the air touches is right and true.

Living Differently - Shallow Focus

I have taken a lot of portraits but very little of myself, until now. Of course there is the odd picture taken on my antiquated mobile phone and sent to a friend but nothing of substance. It all felt a little too exposing and required too much technical expertise (or so I thought). There was another reason. I look quite ragged a lot of the time and make-up and haircuts feel superfluous when your most constant companion is a cat. My vanity was preventing me from exploring that time-honoured medium of artistic expression - the self portrait. I'm not one of those photographers who really plans a shoot. I tend to work with available light and the choice of location is much more about the subject feeling comfortable than it is about a creative concept. I'm not a big fan of gloss. I don't use a tripod. In short I like to get close and see the light in someone's eyes, or how the subtle change of facial musculature speaks of a whole different emotion. The face is a language we all understand.

Recently the M.E related insomnia was getting to me as was the disability benefits process. In addition to this, having only been unwell a year (although it can feel a lot longer at times) I was in the thick of grieving my past life. The tears came and did not stop. I was crushed by my own sadness and could not see an end to my crying. It also meant that connecting to people, especially my good and valued friends who also live with chronic illness, became almost impossible.

I was at a loss. Then I remembered the advice of a good friend who had told me, much earlier in the year when I was again feeling overwhelmed, to just go outside and take photographs which resulted in an entire project 'Still Life'. This time as my anguish increased I picked up my camera, kept the focus shallow and aimed the lens at myself. I could not plan or design the shoot. All I had to do was turn up and reveal myself, in all my desperation, to the camera.

Then something happened. I was both totally in the moment and observing it at the same time. I was able to experience the extent of my terror and not be afraid of it. This photographic process had enabled me to enter in to these feelings without being consumed by them. As a result a friend who also lives with chronic illness posted these brave and unflinching images on her blog. We discussed how self-documentation can lead to self-acceptance.

Then something else happened. The oil-slick mood that had taken over the past few months of my life began to disperse. M.E symptoms are constantly in flux, it's an illness marked by mystery and unanswered questions. Having a good day, week or month and thinking that this may signal the return to physical health is as foolhardy as planning a wedding on a first date. Instead I now have a living archive of this changing state - a brand new photographic project called 'Pretty' and a reminder that the creative process, unlit and unknown as it seems at times, can really save our lives.

Festival of Us

I have been living with CFS/ME since last year. My good friend Mark has arranged a fundraiser, Festival of Us, for me so I can get some essential tests which are not available on the NHS. It would be great if you could come along/spread the word.

Festival of Us - a night of the very best in spoken word plus dancing until late

When: Friday August 17th 7pm Where: Cottons, 70 Exmouth Market EC1 Tickets: £6/5 and £11/10 with food

Artists on the night include: Tshaka Campbell Courttia Newland Dzifa Benson Paul Cree Leila Segal Esther Poyer LyricL Joelle Taylor Jill Abram Dean Atta Agnes Meadows Musa Okwonga Dan Cockrill

Hosted by poet Mark 'Mr T' Thompson and with soul filled tunes from Jazz FM's Chris Philips, this one off event promises to an unmissable night.

Living Differently - Platinum Heaven

In an episode of Frasier - brothers Niles and Frasier get an invite to an exclusive health spa. They are contented and smug until they find they have not been let in to the gold members zone. Finally they find a way in only to see that there is a platinum door - forcing this open they end up on the roof with the rubbish. The message here is about being where you are and finding contentment with that. And, of course, that our search for a 'better' sort of happiness is illusive. Since last autumn I have been living with M.E/CFS. This has meant I have had to draw on inner reserves that I did not know I had. I've also had to ditch fantasies of a gold or platinum member's zone. And for me that means a busy creative working life, much social activity and a freedom I took for granted. It's also meant I am learning to anchor myself to the moment, however challenging that is and a lot of howling at the moon when all else fails. Acceptance is a tricky one, either one fights the truth of one's circumstances or one reluctantly surrenders to life as it is.

But this experience has taught me a great deal. I would be lying if I said I was grateful, I'm still very much in the angry grief stage of this process. What I do know is how important humour is. It is the salve to heal all ills, even ridiculous ideas of a platinum heaven.

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