The first unifying thread that drew me to Hugo-Victor Solomon’s work was the honesty and frankness of his portraits.
Hugo, originally from Seattle, Washington, now lives in Montreal, Canada, where he created affection portrait-focused photo. For clarity, influence can be thought of as an emotion or a subjective experience.
Hugo started photography in 2016. He had a well-documented childhood with both his parents taking many pictures of Hugo and his siblings. He has a “photographic memory” – in the sense that photographs act as a meaning and a certain intention is preserved in them. The familiar documentary image acts as a storehouse of emotional energy. Or like a photo theorist Roland Barthes so to speak, there is a certain punctuation stored in these images.
His upbringing developed an interest in documentary-style portraiture. When he finally received his first camera, which happened to be his sister’s old camera, he was finally able to convey the language of pictures in the way that his camera phone in his day. That point can’t. He started taking more and more pictures.
I love taking pictures of my friends… taking pictures of others.
Hugo mentioned that he had difficulty in social situations.
I’m too shy to contribute. I am very neurotic. I struggle a lot in social situations. I have autism spectrum disorder, among other conditions. It manifests as extreme social anxiety.
However, with a camera, he can better relate to people. Through photography, he is able to contribute to social contexts as well as gain a better understanding of others. He confesses that he observes and stares – always looking and looking for something.
Both the weird and the neurotic makes his work both strange and tender – a certain focus on self and self-portraits. All photography is a kind of self-portrait: the most authentic images take on an aspect of the photographer’s essence and what he or she has seen. Just to be clear, he emphasized that photographers who treat models as strict bodies and photographers who consider their bodies as irrelevant don’t feel it’s right for him. He feels that artist and model, subject and muse are interchangeable and that everyone can limit or separate these aspects of themselves. Don’t label or guess yourself the ‘wrong’ way. This is how advertising has traditionally worked, but it shouldn’t be this way. It doesn’t have to be this way.
I always photograph in such a way that I guide the subjects I photograph to move flexibly. I find beauty in the midst of the micro-expressions that people have or a little influence there and then it disappears.
Contrary to this, Hugo seriously works from pose to pose and won’t move until he knows what his next pose is. He didn’t plan such poses in advance and let them happen naturally during the photo event. There are too many things for everyone that are not within our control. So by working this way, he combines posing by controlling the pose but letting each pose happen organically. It’s the push and the pull to allow for a wide open space that works for him and works for him.
Also, much of his work, especially his self-portraits, uses nudity as a tool.
OK. I am easily hurt. You are?
Hugo promotes that self-portraits, especially nude portraits, are a great way to connect with the self as a means of self-actualization. Self-portraits don’t make you a better person, but the act of turning on the camera yourself will put you on that path. To clarify, it’s really not about the final image or what you create, but the actual process of creating it.
In a way, self-portraits are a means of bringing out all of your body’s perfect points — but also imperfections. And then just embrace all this and learn to accept it. What do you like about your body? What do you not like about your body? That’s what it is.
Usually working in the position comes with some inherent challenges. He gives advice to get a tripod if you plan to create your own portrait. It’s really annoying to do it without a tripod. He did literally self-portraits in mountains and forests, wheat fields and blizzards. The point is to be in these locations and really be in the landscape. Have index material about being in a place and use that as an extension of the truth.
You need to be honest with yourself. What’s in your head turns into an image.
I can say 99% of my photos are in the present moment because I have a camera and I see something that I want to capture.
Sometimes, it’s really frustrating to create artwork that the viewer isn’t trying to take seriously. Or try to see the immaterial behind matter. Meaning, art is an expression of nuance and often people don’t take the time to appreciate multiple perspectives. An image is not only what is in the photo, but also in a certain context. There may be things not seen in the frame, or may have happened since the time the image was taken, which still gives the image a quality context.
That is to say, it can be a picture of something – but it is not quite a picture of that thing. There’s more to it than what’s shown in the frame.
Art requires you to make room for yourself to appreciate something else.
An ink painting is a picture of water or a lake. But individually, it can have a certain emotional impact or response that it can elicit in the viewer. So if you’ve had a family vacation by the lake or have had a good or bad experience with water, the image of that thing can make you feel (or even think) about things or events. that case.
Image provided by Hugo-Victor Solomon. Used with permission.
