Bio

Steve Young, Barcelona Spain

My name is Steve Young and I am now based in Spain although originally from London.
This place is my home and has influenced my changing vision over the last decade of what it is that I want to work on as a photographer.

My practice bridges both commercial work and fine art personal projects. I am both a signature photographer and commercial photographer.

My creative work as a practitioner, during the ten years that I have been a student towards a BA (Hons) degree in photography, and the five or six years before this as a new photographer has emerged gradually and through much experimentation and study. My work is heavily influenced by ideas that are based in far eastern religion, especially buddhism, and to some extent philosophical and anthropological works that explore the nature of experience in a more secular vein.

From the beginning of my photography path I have always been interested in the nature of perception and ideas related to meaning. This area has taken me into studying buddhist thought as well as social critics such as Barthes and anthropologists such as Victor Turner. The field of liminality studies has also helped form my ideas. Liminality is a concept that is based in anthropology but has many applications in the contemporary art world as a device that points towards the ideas and experiences of transition, change, transformation and ritual behaviour. My work is often marked by observing changes and their significance of the meaning in a photo, which in turn takes its inspiration from looking at life itself as one continuous process of change.

Over the years I have photographed in many of the major genres including landscape, street photography, portraiture and experimental staged mes-en- scene. Commercially I have photographed: real estate, portraiture, events, art work and architecture.

I am most at home when I get to experiment with the camera and step outside of the norms of composition and formal ways of working with photography.

I like to see how far meaning can be expanded and challenged through photography and how much perceptions can be altered or re-evaluated. In my commercial work I use documentary or straight photography, applying these methods to provide what a client wants or needs for their project. In my own creative work, the lid comes off of trying to produce documents and instead I work with symbols, metaphors and the sense of the uncanny, paradoxical and ambiguous in the photo.

One of my biggest influences has been my own professor of photography studies at university Ariadne Xenou. She influenced me strongly in the artistic exploration of the concept of liminality and helped me see more deeply into the textual traditions that developed these ideas. The photo as a potential of meaning rather than something fixed in time and history or the photo as a shape shifter in terms of its meaning depending upon context is far more challenging a way to work with the medium than documentary. However, this challenge has helped expand my way of thinking about the nature of perception in general; how we see the world and assume fixity whereas the reality is constant change and movement.

The impermanence of phenomena, a key idea of buddhism, suggests a deeper reality at work than is perceived by the normal senses or the camera. I am therefore interested in how the camera makes things seem fixed in time and am interested to challenging the notions of fixity both in terms of the subject matter of the photo as well as its meaning.

People interest me, although I am not primarily a portrait photographer. I use whatever symbols or metaphors are needed to produce the work. However, I enjoy collaborations with others that are creative and inventive, including models that I have worked with to stage images that have a more artistic intention. My general approach to working with others is to give space for inventive ideas to emerge without compromising my own vision or theirs.