Goggles to lenses
Lara Wyatt talks to Vaughan Brookfield about the leap from snowboarding to photography, and his project Uninterrupted
There’s nothing like a major injury — one that crushes your sporting career dreams — to introduce you to the world of photography. Vaughan Brookfield had big dreams of becoming a professional snowboarder, and was heading in this direction, travelling to such places as America and Japan with his likeminded friends. That was until he dislocated his shoulder and couldn’t compete for a season, and chose to stay in America watching his friends from the sidelines with his camera for company.
Brookfield already knew his way around a camera thanks to his photography studies at high school, where he focused on shooting black-and-white images. He says he always had a camera in hand, even when he was young.
“I think the time I got injured really kicked off more serious thinking about photography. I ended up in the backcountry with my mates and not being able to snowboard, so I ended up taking photos of them snowboarding. I sent a bunch of the photos I took into NZ Snowboarder magazine and they put one of them on the cover,” Brookfield says.
“They ran about half of my photos in the magazine, and I got a pay cheque in the mail, which was nice.”
Over time Brookfield continued to travel with his friends and follow his passion for snowboarding, but he found he was photographing more and snowboarding less. He ended up working for four magazines, mainly in New Zealand and Australia, but progressed further afield.
“It was in that very niche market of pro snowboarding, and that’s all I really knew for awhile. I started doing more with Red Bull and other large advertising companies, and things changed a lot, and in the last three years it’s changed quite dramatically,” Brookfield says.
Despite being very busy, and enjoying the challenge of working with such clients
as Tourism New Zealand, Air New Zealand, Lamborghini, Mountain Dew, Billabong and Mons Royale, and many others, Brookfield says being able to keep working on his own personal projects is “hugely important.”
“If you’re committing all your time to commercial contracts there is little opportunity for creative development outside of the commercial brief. So my personal projects are a real release for me, and help me develop my ideas,” Brookfield says.
As well as having projects that are all about satisfying the desire to shoot for creative release, Brookfield says they may also be a reason why he continues to get the vast array of jobs that he does.
“I think people often hire me because of my personal projects, even though they may not want me to treat their project the same way, I think people like that I’m continuing to work on personal creative development that can support commercial work.”
His project Uninterrupted began as a bit of a fluke. Brookfield was looking back on his work, developing and updating his portfolio on his website, and he started to see a strong pattern of a style of images that he unwittingly captured.
“I was subconsciously shooting them without really thinking a lot about it, but I quite often had photos from different shoots I liked at the time of someone’s back to me. Often these photos were of people just looking the other way or perhaps having a little contemplative moment,” Brookfield says.
Looking at the images in the Uninterrupted series, it seems beyond belief that little time was put into setting up the shots. But this lack-oftime factor is exactly what Brookfield found to be a great element in fitting the project into his busy schedule.
“When done quickly they can be fitted around other shoots. I didn’t spend time setting up those shots. As for most of the time they’re in a moment. Like maybe on another shoot where I’ve got gear set up — I’ll have lighting because I’m doing another shoot there.”
Capturing the images is all down to a moment when the person in the shot may look
away for an instant, or they may be doing something else. Other times, Brookfield says it could just be that he’s walking down the beach with a friend, and he’ll spot something which captures his eye and he’ll shoot that for the series.
“The image with the donkey was taken in Laos. I was with a PhD student who was doing some research there on the displacement of local people through development of roading, etc., and we got access to go and stay in a little village. It was just a crazy experience in general. But this lady is just off with her newborn to go and work for the day, and that was very spontaneous too,” Brookfield says of one of his images.
Although he says that Uninterrupted was quite a manageable project to take on around his everyday commercial committments, the ideas he has for future personal projects will put more pressure on his spare time.
“My ideas for personal projects are getting more and more inventive, and they take a lot more production time — getting props and planning locations, lugging in lighting equipment to make it look the way I want it to look. Those ones require a lot more time, and finding spare time to do that is very hard … but I feel like they’re a lot more rewarding.”
For 43 weeks Brookfield has posted a new Uninterrupted image onto his Tumblr blog weekly, and he also shares his images on his Facebook and Instagram pages, where he says he receives a good response. But he’s adamant that it’s not about chasing feedback.
“It’s more like, can I do this and how long can I do this for? And it’s intriguing to me. It’s more of a personal challenge.”