Faint Light, 2011
Brendan George Ko (Toronto, ON)
How did you get into photography? I always habit of going through my folk’s closet growing up. They seemed to keep a lifetime before having kids in there. One day I picked up my mother’s old camera and asked her about it. She taught me how to use it, and from there I was hooked, leaving a life that was spent drawing for something immediate and indexical: photography.
What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally? Investigating my past in search of myself, in different moments of my life. Intertwined are faces and landscapes I had forgotten, and how much they mean to me and how they still resonate within me (even after all these years).
What makes a good image to you? When I somehow am able to produce an image that surprises me, that even goes as far as to allude me with its mystery, and for a moment I feel like an outsider looking in.
Your favourite film and why? I’m somewhere between P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia and Yuasa Masaaki’s Mind Game. Magnolia has this sort of atmosphere to it, that carries throughout, with the look, the cut scenes of a storm brewing in the sky, the chaos of the character’s lives, the music, there is something vernacular and spectacular about that film, then when something supernatural happens it makes sense within a believable reality. Mind Game is on a different spectrum, being a hot bath of absurdly creative story-telling and visual narrative, it feels like a dream watching it for the first time, you’re fully immersed in it, taken away on this crazy adventure.
Your favourite quote? ”Everything’s a metaphor.” - Goethe
What was the last interesting dream you remember? I came home, and a cheetah ran up to me and grabbed me, scaring me to death, and then I realized it wasn’t malling me, but hugging me. Later I found out it could talk, and we talked about all sorts of things which I can’t quite remember, a deep conversation, and then I told her, her name was Sarah, that she was very much human, she corrected me, telling me she was far from it. I took her photograph and woke up.
Your favourite photographer/artist? Somewhere between Jim O’Rourke and Miranda July.
Latest obsession? Writing as much as I can. And Murakami.
If you can sum up your photos in one word, what would that be? Atmosphere.
If you could speak another language what would it be? Japanese.
