Aug 27 2008
Great New Artists: Holger Pooten
Funny name, great photography.
German born photographer Holger Pooten is one of the best new photographers I have seen in a long time. It is rare when I find photography (outside of fashion photography) that elicits emotion these days. Somehow he gets away with highly stylized fashion-esque photography in the realm of advertising. The best answer I can offer for this is that it’s because he works in London because you would never get away with that here.
His work explores objects and emotion as if they are one and the same. Including one picture which I found I related to particularly well of a girl sitting on the bed looking at her laptop (guess where I’m writing this). His work is just as personal whether it is for his portfolio or for one of the high profile clients he has worked for. And who says you can only have a few pictures in your portfolio? His website has the most portfolio pieces I have ever seen for a photographer or a designer.
Plus he has given me my favorite quote: “When I need to find new ideas or topics I will take an afternoon off lie on the bed and let my mind wander around, asking myself questions like ‘what is your core interest in photography?’ or ‘why where you so impressed by this image you’ve seen 3 years ago?’ Normally after 3 hours, I have a lot of raw material that I can transform into shoots and there ideas normally stay with me for years, until I finally found the time to realize them.”
