T E E NS TALK H OB BIES:
PHOTOGRAPHY In t erviewee: JOAN N A HI L L
Joanna is a 15-year-old photographer who lives in London. Here she tells us about her passion for her craft, her artsitic influences and inpiration, and gives advice for beginners just starting out. You can see Joanna's Street Style photography project for Tangereene after this interview on page 68. What first drew you to photography?
What did you take images of?
In the beginning, I didn’t really have a passion for photography, I just liked to see how all my photos looked together on my Instagram feed, it was something that created a sense of achievement as I had created it by myself. However, in quarantine when I was feeling a little lost like many other people, photography sort of found me while I was trying to pick myself back up myself (cheesy, I know). It’s one of the only things I do that comes completely naturally to me and I don’t really have to overthink it once I’ve started a photoshoot.
My first love, before portraits, is travel photography. Because of Corona, I can no longer travel abroad to beautiful scenes and in a way I'm grateful for the challenge as with landscape photography you are capturing beauty that is already there and you didn't make. With portraits I get to have creative control and test myself by organising the storytelling, colour schemes, what model will fit the theme, etc. I think I will always miss the heavily saturated pictures of random lakes I took a lot of when I just started photography though!
When did you first pick up a camera?
Is there anyone who has influenced your photography work?
I had a little pink compact camera as a kid but the first time I had ever really seen a proper professional DSLR camera was at my friend’s house. I remember being fascinated with it, it had all these weird buttons and was unbelievably heavy. I couldn’t, and still can’t really, wrap my head around the fact cameras can freeze a split second in time as a sort of return ticket to the past. Who needs time travelling when you have a camera?
A few years ago, my grandad took me to an exhibition on the famous self-portrait photographer Cindy Sherman. I loved her work and how she creates a distinctly different character in each of her series which stick in your mind long after seeing the photo. I also take a lot of inspiration from what’s popping up on my Instagram explore page and after a while, I started to see patterns in what I liked in a photo and what made me unkeen on it, making it easier to decipher what I do and don’t like in images so I can learn from it in my own work. 67