Spotlight: Levon Baird
Growing up on a small island called Waiheke in New Zealand, and since moving to Sydney Australia, Levon Baird is someone who spends all their time taking photographs. His portfolio is a true reflection of his practice as we come to understand a bright and honest life through his lens.
It feels like your look and feel is constantly evolving and personal work is as important as paid work. How important is creative play and pushing the bounds of what you know/like?
It’s extremely important - like anything, the only way you get better is by pushing yourself beyond what is comfortable or familiar, and trying to get into the core of what you actually want to be creating. How else do you figure out what you want to do, other than by experimentation?
It seems like you've found interest in experimenting with composition and perspectives, your commercial work is fresh and exciting and your editorial work is deep, and interesting and developed, how do the ideas and concepts for these come about to evolve into a unique style such as yours?
I try to base all of my creative decisions around opinions or feelings I have about the world, or photography in general. For example: My colours all developed from this thought that, if you really pay attention to what you see in day-to-day life, it's a mixture of dull tones (greys/browns/blacks/whites) in buildings, bright blues (in the sky), and bold reds/yellows/greens (in advertisements, shop-fronts, stop-signs etc) and so I felt that, in an odd way, having images reflect these tones would in a sense be more truthful and real than going for a desaturated look. My compositions tend to be either precisely structured or very off-kilter - that comes from feeling that the world is a bit shaken up right now so I want the feeling of my photographs to reflect that; things being controlled, and out of control. On and on it goes.
Where and when do you get your best ideas?
Ah, lots of different places. Recently I’ve been looking at a lot of old found photos from the 1970s and earlier - Family snapshots and such. There’s a unique look to how people captured the world around them back then, not as professional photographers but just as people, that I’ve been enjoying and drawing from. Generally my best ideas just come from thinking about things though - one thought leads to another leads to another. Not the most groundbreaking answer, but by and large I reckon taking the time to stop and actually just think things over works quite well.
Talk us briefly through the set up of one of your most loved, or most interesting projects?
This series for Lee Mathews came about from finding all these old references of womens calisthenics from the 1940s. We wanted to create a photojournalistic feeling to the images so we directed the group through a series of exercises while I shot quite loosely, responding to whatever was happening. Everything was shot in about 45 minutes as, due to very bad luck, it was 40C that day - Too hot to be outside for long. Especially wearing mostly black.
Any tips or tricks for aspiring photographers or creatives looking to break through the noise like you have?
At the very core of everything, all it's about is creating intriguing work, that looks different to what other people are doing, and then getting that work in front of people who commission photographers. So I’d say: accept that it takes a few years to get anywhere approaching good, and that the time goes faster the more work you produce. Shoot as close to every day as you can. Try new things, it's how you develop a style. Simultaneously, at least for a while, don’t try to “have a style” - Just make what you want to make without overthinking how it fits into everything. Put your own standards up extremely high. Spend a ton of time on lighting and retouching. Don’t use film as a crutch for not knowing how to get good colours in digital. Have fun.
