• Vikk Shayen's personal projects create surreal imagery, with minimal use of compositing in their production. She has worked extensively in fashion and theatre.
    Vikk Shayen's personal projects create surreal imagery, with minimal use of compositing in their production. She has worked extensively in fashion and theatre.
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Vikk Shayen travelled a roundabout route into professional photography. She tells Robert Keeley how her surreal personal imagery is created without compositing.

Vikk Shayen has found her recent photographic forays into China to be quite challenging. Many aspects of working in the most populous country in the world tests photographers, she says, from organising logistics to carrying gear through airports, with their endless security checks. But that’s been just one more challenge for Shayen, who has faced a lot of them in her development as a rapidly rising professional shooter.

To date she has overcome them all, and in the process she’s forged an expanding career with her quirky and slightly surreal images across a range of categories. Working as a professional photographer today is becoming ever more taxing, but while Shayen’s most personal images often take viewers aback and require at least a second glance, she says clients hire her for her ability to create “something different photographically”. It’s interesting to note then, that while she’s does a lot of detailed post-production work (and is a perfectionist with it) she would like to outsource this more and does so when she finds a re-toucher with a similar vision.

“I prefer to be out in the field,” she says. When she does get out with her camera, and she is creating her personal fine-art work with its highly abstract concepts, she uses real-world set-ups and physical props in some unusual outdoor locations. She’ll then combine this with what can be described as traditional post-production techniques. In short, while commercial work these days requires a high degree of retouching capability which she handles with skill, she doesn’t believe the answer to every photographic idea lies in Photoshop.

Vikk Shayen's personal projects create surreal imagery, with minimal use of compositing in their production. She has worked extensively in fashion and theatre.
Miao Water Buffalo, Miao Gem Series. Shot in China for a winter collection fashion shoot. Canon EOs 5D Mk III. A reflector and natural light were used to light the scene.


EARLY DAYS

Shayen showed an interest in film photography from her teenage years, when she was involved in it as a school subject in Melbourne. Though born in Singapore, she grew up in Australia, and throughout her school years she was interested in documentary photography and was inspired by image-makers like Eugene Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I didn’t know at that time whether I wanted to make it a profession, but I certainly knew I was hooked on watching an image appear in the developer,” she says. But eventually, despite the attractions of the documentary genre, Shayen felt she wasn’t suited to it.

She recalls a pivotal incident in her early pursuit of the craft when her images were good enough to get selected for the post-graduation student exhibition Top Art in 2004. But the organisers were unable to exhibit her work because her written essay component was short of half a grade. The incident turned her off entering competitions for many years, and it’s only in recent times her view on that has softened. She took commerce at Melbourne University and made friends with a range of fellow students, working to grow the university photography club and also becoming inspired by theatre groups along the way.

Shayen says her work, especially her more recent portfolios, has been heavily influenced by theatre and what she describes as “the uniqueness of the Melbourne theatre scene”. “I think it’s a very big and important part of my development and differentiation. My most influential theatre director is Romeo Castellucci from Societas Raffaello Sanzio.”

When she graduated she says she soon faced her first major “curveball in life” when she finished university just as the Global Financial Crisis hit the world’s economy. Like so many other graduates from that time, she could not get a job. “It was terrible,” says Shayen, “I couldn’t get a job. I was broke – Centrelink-type broke.”

She finally found a corporate position and also began shooting photo assignments part time, but it was exhausting juggling the two disparate tasks. She says it was a relief to finally build her photographic client base to a level where she could start shooting full time.


Miao Children, Miao Gem Series. Canon EOS 5D Mk III, post-production in Photoshop CC.

CHANGE OF DIRECTION

She says of the decision to go full time, “It’s not easy.” Fortunately, she says, she “didn’t fall off the map”. By that stage he had built up enough contacts to maintain a steady workflow of assignments. In 2013 she won an award from US-based PDN Magazine for her commercial portrait work. She then organised a trip to America, which through her contacts resulted in a subsequent fashion shoot. She says, “The key takeaway here is that you go out and you ask, and you put yourself out there.” At the time of writing there were plans for another US shoot.

She has also travelled to China a number of times to shoot assignments. Developing her business expertise has proved another challenge. She says, “The internet has a lot of stuff about how to quote for work.” But she is also working with connections who have advised her on the business requirements. “It’s about negotiating, and people skills,” she says. “It’s important to know where you stand. Everyone knows budgets (for commercial shoots) are getting smaller. Those budgets are fine to work with if the work required matches up to that budget. It’s the times when the budget is small, but the outcome required is 10 times the budget, that you have to either explain why it’s 10 times the budget, or find a comfortable ground between you and the client, or cut your losses.”


Performanscape Series. Bubbled #3. Shot on location at Kinglake, Victoria. All bubbles are real!

PERSONAL PROJECTS

Shayen’s website reveals a wide range of work with distinctive approaches in both her commercial and personal images. Before the last Ballarat International Foto Biennale (BIFB) in 2013 she was invited by Director Jeff Moorfoot to take part in its prestigious Core exhibition series, where these key shooters are asked to showcase their work, usually with a highly personal slant. Shayen’s series of performance and landscape-based surrealistic images, titled ‘Performanscape’, covered four separate series where she worked with performance artists in outdoor locations, creating surreal images in which the artists were sometimes caught leaping and jumping in mid-air, or in unusual scenarios.

In the series ‘Bubbled’ Shayen shot her subjects in formal attire (tuxedos and long flowing evening dresses) positioned amongst wild bushland near Kinglake, north of Melbourne, which had been ravaged by fire in 2009. The truly surreal element she added was that each participant had an acrylic lighting bubble fitted on their heads! Combined with that, large floating, soap-like bubbles were drifting across these landscape scenes.

Most interestingly of all, none of these props had been added in post-production. Shayen hunted down a commercial lighting supplier for the fish bowl-like bubbles and modified them so the performers could wear them, and then enlisted an expert in creating large soap bubbles. She says the troupe from the theatre company had trekked through the bush from a muddy road searching for a creek at which she wanted to shoot. “The road was muddy, they were dressed in tuxedos and long dresses, and we couldn’t find the creek!” she says.

Eventually they found the creek, which she had previously visited, but which was by then dry. Ironically this produced an equally, if not more intriguing image. This amazing amount of work was done with the full knowledge that the resulting effects could more easily have been achieved in Photoshop. But Shayen is unapologetic about the amount of effort involved. “In advertising and commercial work you can’t escape Photoshop and post-production, but you can make beautiful work without it, using props and approaches similar to traditional darkroom techniques,” she says. She describes her work as “still and sometimes clinical”.


Performanscape Series, Bubbled #1. Kinglake, Victoria. All real props (including the large bubble).

“I get asked to composite and Photoshop a lot or to shoot for heavy post-production in my commercial work, so that’s probably why in my fine-art work I am currently exploring how to bring back the magic of seeing a surreal image that didn’t have elements of post-production.” She notes, “I prefer not to do heavy compositing in post-production where possible because it’s better in selling the reality of the image, but sometimes because of the budget constraints there needs to be post-production work involved, and these days to be competitive it’s something that can’t be avoided.”

Other images in the “Performanscape” series were shot at a location in the hilly You Yangs regional park west of Melbourne with performers scantily clad in a form representative of Japanese butoh (in freezing cold conditions!), and then on wind-blown sand dunes near Cape Bridgewater in far western Victoria, where some dancers were caught leaping and falling, and one was positioned on an iron-frame bed. These were all major logistical exercises requiring lots of organisation, effort, and sometimes several crew members.

It’s hard work for Shayen and any crew coming along, and tough on the performers (especially those who had to wear heavy plastic bubbles on their heads!). But Shayen believes it’s worthwhile to create her images in a real sense, out amongst the Australian landscape. “I very much wanted to emphasise the beauty and awe of the natural environment, and the landscape is a big part of my work,” she says. She noted that she had visited the Kinglake location several times from shortly after it had burned out in February, 2009, and by the time she shot this series, much of its greenery had returned, though some forest would never fully recover. “In Kinglake I learned that nature takes care of itself,” she says.

She says every person who saw her Kinglake series asked if it was done “in Photoshop”. “They couldn’t see the magic,” says Shayen with a hint of exasperation. She makes the point that in creating these images she wanted to show how consumers of photography have been so desensitised by highly post-processed visual imagery that they had to be told what is real and what isn’t.


Dasshoku Shake, Yumi Umiumare, Helen Smith, Willow J Conway. Multiple balloons were released by a background assistant, Multiple shots were then composited to fill spaces where needed.

The BIFB exhibition led to her work recently being included in a group exhibition showing in China. The ‘Wizards of Oz’, an exhibition of 10 major Australian photographers’ images, was shown at the Pingyao International Photo Festival (PIP) in China last September. Supported by the Ballarat International Foto Biennale organisers ‘The Wizards of Oz’ exhibition featured Shayen amongst 10 photographers who had previously appeared in the BIFB Core program. Shayen says that during the exhibition in China she had one person quite aggressively suggest to her that her work was Photoshopped. “He was effectively telling me I was lying!” she says.

EQUIPMENT CHOICES

Shayen has built up her own kit over time, and she says she has lots of artificial lighting set ups. But she also works with a limited amount of kit, hiring some gear when she feels it’s necessary. She shoots with a Canon 5D Mk II (and sometimes with a Canon EOS 1D Mk IV), a 24-70mm zoom, a 16-35mm zoom, and 85mm, 50mm, and 35mm prime lenses. If necessary she will hire equipment when the job requires it. She says she has hired a tilt/shift lens for architecture if she’s needed it, and also medium-format gear when required.


Performanscape Series 'Scenarios in suspended consciousness No. 1'.

Commercially she now shoots theatre images, advertising, fashion and portraiture. “I always work well with clients,” she says. “What I can’t escape is that to be commercially competitive that type of photography almost always requires a certain level of post-production and I think that’s a reasonable request from the client.” She says with the current trends in the industry she also has to pitch harder to explain the details of what’s involved in any given assignment. “You have to accept defeat sometimes,” she says, “They won’t always see it your way.

Shayen learned her craft in the traditional darkroom and by shooting film. “All I knew was film. I was in the darkroom every single day,” she says. She is now in the process of planning a new series of images which will be shot on film. Her exhibition at the last BIFB could also provide an avenue to the fine-art market.

She remembers the let-down when her work was rejected at that Top Art exhibition many years ago. And her final piece of advice carries a message. “I didn’t put myself out there. But you’ve got to keep putting your work out. If you throw 100 darts, one will hit the mark. Go to major events, get portfolio reviews, explore other people’s work. You can’t get better if you don’t put yourself out there.”

COMPUTER HARDWARE & SOFTWARE

Shayen uses both a Macbookpro 15in and an iMac 27in, the Macbookpro for location work and the iMac 27in for more detailed editing work. She says, “I also use a medium Wacom tablet. The Macbookpro and Wacom tablet could be replaced by the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 which I am going to be testing out. Also, because I’m left-handed my computer set up can be a little odd because Photoshop, like most things, was made for right-handed people. I use a combination of Photoshop, Capture One, Lightroom, and DXO Viewpoint for distortion. Lightroom is great for archiving and linking to Photoshop, but Capture One renders colours better. If you’re going to do some serious photo editing get the 27in iMac and don’t ‘cheap out’ on the specs.”


Performanscape Series, Tamaokoshi - Evocation.


This image involved no manipulation of the main elements. The model jumped off a ladder!

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