Interviews
Tony Luong
Tony Luong’s photographs are driven by his obsession with the mundane and banal, and his gift is turning something ordinary into an extraordinary photo. There’s a sense of surrealism when viewing his work—his photographs rely on happenstance while retaining a sense of cohesive visual integrity. His clients include Wired, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vice, Barneys, and IBM.
You have cultivated a bit of a sub-specialty in photographing people at their places of business. A lot of photographers might be bored at the thought of oversized blazers and bright cubicles, but you manage to make the spaces and people look lush, intriguing, and dynamic. Did that take a few tries? How do you elevate seemingly mundane topics? Tell us your secret.
The idea of creating this sub-specialty is fascinating to me and much appreciated. I think rather than elevating seemingly mundane topics, I am interested in the human condition and especially in office environments like what you mentioned, there is something innately fascinating about how mundane those places can be. Translating that into an interesting photograph is a combination of lighting, chance and the ability to embrace that “boring” subject matter. The whole process has and continues to be an ongoing exercise of being able to hone in on what might happen and moving forward with actually photographing it.
What’s your favorite place you ever shot in?
I don’t know if I have a favorite since each project can be so different. I can either feel at ease or on edge as a result of the people, lighting, mood, the list can go on but it doesn’t have much impact on the pictures in the end.
What’s your most-used tool?
Camera!
Have you always been into photography? What did you grow up doing, creatively?
Basically, I grew up in a small town on the shoreline of Connecticut where there wasn’t all that much to do until I got into bmx and skateboarding. My sister got me a video camera for one of my birthdays and my interest in video/photography grew until I broke the video camera. From that point, I focused on photography and became obsessed. I became one of those “high school photographer kids”.
Do you think it’s gotten harder to convince clients of a photographer’s value now that everyone has access to the tools (if not necessarily the experience and talent)?
Certainly, social media seems to have homogenized photography in a way that has pushed people into a direction where the actual core of the picture is overlooked and we are taking things, like photography, on a surface level and not for how the picture reads. I have faith that clients still have an understanding of what makes a good picture but I do question certain decisions at times. I also think the scale in which people are engaged with photography such as Instagram has influenced how and what we find interesting. Small nuances in photographs are often lost due to the fact that most of us are looking at photos on a 3″ wide screen and so of course, there are shifts with how someone makes pictures. It is what it is and I understand that there needs to be a level of adapting in order to make a living but I question the consequences when photographers make pictures a certain way to be read a certain way in a certain app.
