I've seen Mathieu around for a while now. Last year he came in and showed some images of a personal project called "Walkabout" which he walked from downtown LA to the beach taking with him his camera and a Profoto 7B on a roller. It took him 4 days to cross the city. And I was wowed by that....but then again, Mathieu spent a week sleeping on Skid Row on another project so this didn't surprised me as much ! I decided to chat with him about this and emailed him :
PIX : Mathieu, so I was inspired by your series when you showed this to me. What bought you to this project ? And how did you go about doing so ?
YOUNG : Thanks. The idea for Walkabout happened about a year ago now. I was working as a photo assistant, and I was hungry for a project that I could use to try and earn some photo work of my own. But I was severely constrained in terms of time and money: I couldn't afford to take off much time from working, and I couldn't afford to pay models/styling/assistants/gear/etc etc. Those constraints ended up being a really positive thing, because they forced me to think of something that I could do cheap and quick, but would still be interesting and have impact. I was really excited when the idea for Walkabout sprang into mind, because it seemed like a great way to look at the city with fresh eyes, and a chance to better understand the different neighborhoods and their denizens.
So I spent a day testing the light, which was just a single strobe strapped onto a roller, and the next morning at dawn I parked east of Downtown, unloaded, and started walking.
PIX : Why start downtown ? What was the reason behind the downtown to the beach ?
YOUNG : I mapped the general path before I started. I wanted to walk through as many neighborhoods as possible and see as much socio-economic diversity as I could. I ended up walking through Downtown, Echo Park, Silverlake, East Hollywood, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Santa Monica and finished in Venice. I also thought there was something poetic about finishing at the ocean, it just felt right.
PIX : Makes sense. Tell me about your experiences. Did you meet a lot of folks, were people curious you had a strobe-on-a-roller, any interesting experience ?
YOUNG : I was on the streets about 12 hours a day, four days in a row. I photographed literally hundreds of people. Some were very receptive (it is LA after all), some even approached me, but many were very resistant. I had the same experience again and again, where I would walk up to people and ask to take their picture, and their first response would be 'no', but then they would look and see the light I was pushing and ask what I was doing, and once I got a minute to explain myself, just about everyone let me make a portrait in the end. It was like the absurdity of me pushing the light across the city worked as a great ice breaker.
It was really a lot of fun. Even though I was moving pretty quickly, I met some really interesting folks and had some very engaging conversations.
PIX : That is true, you have your own icebreaker with you ! Now, I only saw a small sample on your site..any chance of a future show or book with this series ?
YOUNG : In my initial edit there was about 100 images that I was really proud of, but I got some (very good) advise to chop it down to the 30 best. I found it to be the right number of images to ask potential clients to look at in one sitting. It's enough to get a sense of what you're trying to do, but not overwhelming. And I would have loved to present the work in a show, but the project really helped me get a lot of work, so I never really had the time to push it. But anything is possible!
PIX : Thanks Mathieu, good luck to you !
www.mathieuyoung.com
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