Interview w/ Harry Chiu // Chinese Photographer

Q: Hey! How are you? Can you introduce yourself to everyone?

A: I am an independent photographer from Shanghai, China. Currently, I mainly focus on portrait photography.

Q: For those who are unaware of your work, you take, what I believe to be creative portraiture photographs. In 2017, you focused on street environmental portraits, and 2018 was indoor creative portraits, and now last year 2019, it seemed to be a mixture of the two to create narrative storytelling. Can you talk about how your process has changed over time?

A: The change comes from the constantly changing environment of growth. As you can see, this is a process of learning how to tell a story.

Q: One trend I see throughout your work is the experimentation with lighting. I’ve seen you use natural light, strobe, illuminated lights from objects, etc. Your more recent work seems to come from natural light mostly. Is that because it makes the photo feel more realistic and less staged?

A: Basically, it's all natural light, natural light is more real, and artificially created. Natural light is more complicated. I don't think the lighting aspect is where I will spend my energy to create.

Q: Your collaborations/commissioned work with Ladybird Boutique and LJINWING seem to be fashion related. What was the idea behind this work, and how did you approach the project using your style?

A: I started shooting because of my photography style before cooperating. The advantage is that I can collaborate based on my own style. Perhaps in these two groups of work, I just focus on portraits, transforming it into clothing-based photography.

Q: You have three Instagram accounts, one that focuses on portraits, another on lighting, and the last on street photography. Is it a passion for all three, that keeps you always creating for each channel? Do you have a favorite among the three, and how has living in Shanghai influenced how you perceive each genre?

A: It takes more time to create portraits than the other two directions. Although a large part of the works are light and street photography, I don’t have much time to publish them.

Question: On January 28th, you posted a portrait titled, Space. It seems like a lot of conceptual thoughts were put into this work. What I found most interesting was the intentional tonal gradient from top to bottom. Why include that into the photo?

A: This is a picture rendered using redshift. The inspiration is a photo taken not too long ago. The endless stairs are used to express that there is no end, and the end is invisible, so it is gradient.

Question: Also in January, on the 17th, you posted a video collaboration with Ziqian that was (in my opinion) exceptional and so well crafted in terms of editing, lighting, and sound. Can you tell us what is being expressed through the combination of all these factors?

A: This was taken at the same time as the previous set of photos. The main thing is to express the story between the cloudy room and the light, because people will try to understand each other with the environment. It is this picture that is taken.

Q: Since most of your work is in Shanghai, do you find yourself running out of ideas when concerning street photographs, or is the city always providing new opportunities? Have you thought about working in a different city to see how your work would evolve?

A: There will be such a depleted moment, of course, because the city is constantly changing, and more interesting stories will be discovered as you go deeper, because there are some places you will not notice before. It is only when you have a certain idea after experiencing it, you will have some experience to gain. I have not considered other cities currently, but if there is business cooperation, the photos may be in other cities.

Q: Is there any photographers you admire that influenced your conceptual work? It seems so profound that I wondered if there is a photographer you learned from, or studied to learn such techniques?

A: I don't really remember the names of some people. All I can remember is the pictures of those photographs. The source words are life experiences and the mood changes from time to time.