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Photographer Simon Young has been producing portrait work for magazine features since 1993. He studied photography at Elam School of Fine Arts in the late 80s, and is based in Auckland.
Anika Moa is a New Zealand singer and radio host whose debut album Thinking Room shot to the top of the New Zealand Albums Chart in 2001; her second album certified gold three years later. She co-presented Flava’s breakfast show until late last year when she left to focus on more music, her health, and her family. Alana Rae interviews Simon Young on his 2016 portrait of Anika Moa.
The background of the image looks interesting; how did you land this location and why did you choose it?
We shot this in wine bar in Grey Lynn called Freida Margolis. I know the guy that owns [the bar] and he was kind enough to let me use it. To me, it’s about setting up a stage; both [you and the subject] are doing a kind of performance. Even though I like my shots to have a quietness to them, I assess in the moment what works and how that person is feeling. You strike someone in the morning, and they might feel great. You strike them in the afternoon and maybe they’re not really wanting to be there. It’s certainly about trying to get their trust very quickly and letting them know they’re safe in my hands. A very common comment from people is, “I hate having my photo taken.”
Do you have to talk people down from that mindset?
Yeah, often I have to tell them to pull it back a bit, but Anika was wonderful to work with. She’s really fun and she’s a really bright woman. We covered such a spectrum within an hour and got some beautiful, quiet, moody shots. But she couldn’t be still. She was chatting and laughing so I thought, “let’s go with it”. Sometimes those really spontaneous shots are hard to make sure they don’t look contrived or set up, like the way she’s holding her hand.
I sometimes have performers who have an agenda around publicity, whether it’s the release of an album or a book. Musicians and actors will bring their idea of how they’d like a shoot to go, and you’ve got to kind of corral them. I won’t tell them how to write their album, so I want them to trust me to get the shot that I’ve been called in to shoot.
There’s a bit of a contrast here, too, where she’s happy and smiling in this moody setting.
And she has such beautiful tattoos. I wanted to find a way to incorporate those into the shot without being too obvious and it’s still got that real engagement [with the camera]. A lot of photographers who do portrait work talk about “the gaze” – there’s such a fine line between [a gaze] having authenticity and the intensity of it. Obviously, there would have been 20 or 30 shots in this little sequence, but some just work so much better than others. We also talk about “the moment” and that’s one of the hardest things in photography. It has to be authentic. Compositionally, there’s things I do and don’t want in the shot. It’s a lining up of the planets, if you will.