Less is More

Hi. My style of photography has always been to capture things that seem interesting to me, things that we see on an everyday basis but have never paid close attention to them. It was my goal to shine a different light on them and make them the subject in my photos. And I think I have succeeded in doing so, in a way. I always get weird looks from a lot of people when I'm taking my photos, most probably because they cannot comprehend the reason why I'm taking photos of a chair. But I think their perspective of that chair will change the next time they see it, and they'll hopefully find something interesting about it. I chose 3 photos for all of you to look at. 

A claw machine found in my old neighbourhood, Tampines

Trolleys found outside a supermarket

A spiral staircase at East Coast Park

I also came across this journal on VSCO, where the photographer mentioned the pros of doing film photography. One of the pros was planning what kind of photo you wanted to take and what story you wanted it to tell, in other words, to have intention before taking the photo instead of just blindly shooting and selecting afterwards. And this is where I derived the phrase "less is more", less photos but more intention. 

Now, you are probably wondering what's the link between the two. I wish to start taking photos with more intention and hopefully document more as well. These two photos are from my photo essay titled "Ahma" (which translates to grandmother), which was my final assignment for my photojournalism module. It was to show that the elderly are not as frail and grumpy as society depicts them to be and in fact, they are a joyous bunch who can do work too.

And that being said, that does not mean I will just stick to documenting. I will continue doing street photography as well, but hopefully, I'll put in more intention into my photos and think about what message I want to bring across as well. 

You can follow my progress on VSCO and Instagram as well. 

leexiuzheng.vsco.co

instagram.com/dustyrobe