August 4, 2016

Meet photographer Vivian Chiu

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Vivian Chiu .

Vivian, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I’m the newbie in the family when it comes to photography. My dad was one of the “early adopters” in his college days when photography as a hobby first started becoming more accessible to the general public. My favorite lens that I use today is his 35-year-old 105mm lens that he used to shoot models back in the day. My Nikon d5000 camera is a gift from my brother, who started photography way back when he was in high school. He gave this camera to me when he upgraded, and I’ve been shooting with it ever since.

To be honest, I didn’t jump into photography right away. After my brother gave me the camera, I kind of let it sit around for a while – I was always interested in getting into fashion photography and thought I had an eye for it, but when I looked at my brother’s constantly improving work and the amazing work of other fashion photographers out there, I just felt overwhelmed at how much I had to learn in order to get to the level I wanted to be at. It sounds silly and weak now, but that was my mentality back then.
I finally got the push I needed when I moved to LA after graduating from Northwestern University a year ago. During my senior year of college, a photographer friend I had in Singapore had suggested to me that I become a model and kind of guided me through it, and it was something that was picking up more speed than I had anticipated after relocating to LA. I got signed, started working with a lot of photographers, and very quickly developed a strong interest in being on their side of the camera. Human facial and body structure is the most fascinating and beautiful thing to me, and I just had this passionate drive to capture its beauty in images, and create art with other models. It’s hard to comprehend how someone as technologically challenged as myself could even figure out how to use a DSLR, much less learn the art of editing – I can’t even explain it, but I think all those years of being immersed in my brother’s photography and artwork, browsing Instagram and Tumblr and magazines and models.com for creative inspiration, and being photographed myself, allowed me to learn things along the way that I hadn’t even realized I’d picked up.

These days, I’m mostly focused on shooting swimwear models – the beaches in Southern California are gorgeous all year round, and swimwear photography to me is the perfect blend of fashion and raw, exposed human beauty. Of course I shoot events, LinkedIn head shots, graduation portraits, all that stuff because frankly it’s just more consistent and lucrative work (for where I am right now). But my dream as a photographer would be to someday get to travel to exotic beaches around the world, shooting swimwear and working with other creative, stimulating minds. I want to someday host swimwear photography masterclasses like Joey Wright or shoot for Sports Illustrated Swim like Yu Tsai.
Ultimately, I’ve been shooting for less than a year, I’m a total go-with-the-flow free spirit kind of person, and I have other things I”m pretty passionate about besides fashion photography (most of which I’ve been doing for much longer), so I’m not taking any of this too seriously, I mean, I take it seriously in the sense that I strive to be the best I can be at anything I do, but I’m definitely all about having a chill, positive attitude. I’m not trying to compete with other people, I’m not trying to define myself or measure my self-worth through my skills as a photographer, and I’m definitely not saying it’s something I’ll do forever. It’s something I love right now that makes me feel fulfilled and inspired, and I’m just really grateful for any opportunities I get to learn more, do more, and share my work with others.

Has it been a smooth road?
I feel like I should say I’ve been very fortunate and had an easy ride so far. I’m really lucky to have a brother who’s my best friend, who I can skype any time for shooting advice/editing tips/advice in general, My parents are generally supportive of my creative endeavors, and my dad is already waiting for me to make it big so he can be my manager haha. I have great friends who are down to assist me on shoots (huge shout out to Christina Chang and my awesome boyfriend Brenton Ang), and I was able to get started with pretty decent equipment.

That being said, not everyone I’ve met has been the nicest. Of course that’s part of any job, you work with good and bad people. I think I used to be a bit of a pushover and a bit naive too. I would let models take control of a shoot and of all the terms surrounding it even if it was unfair and disrespectful towards me, I would allow people who knew nothing about the work that goes into photography to talk me down to shooting their head shots for free, I would put a lot of time into responding to emails only to find that it was a scam, etc.

For me, the people really make or break my experience in any activity that I do. If I don’t like the people involved, or if I feel like I’m getting negative and unhealthy vibes from them, I’d rather just go do something else. I don’t like anything in the world enough to do it if the people I”m surrounded by aren’t nice and don’t inspire me with their character. Fortunately for myself, I’ve learned to stick up for myself a little and be more selective about the people I work with. There’s always another opportunity down the road – you don’t need to bend over backwards trying to please someone who disrespects you, discourages you, or doesn’t believe in you.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
I want to get my own studio in Los Angeles, or maybe share one with my brother when he moves back from New York. I know I’ll still love shooting outdoors and at the beach, but I think it would be cool to have my own personal creative space where I can control everything and I have everything I need in one place. I travel from OC to LA several times throughout the week for work, so it would also be cool to have a place of my own in LA that I can stay at while I’m there. Most of the agencies and models are based in LA too, so if I had a studio in LA, the models wouldn’t have to travel as far for me to shoot them. I could hold my own castings there, and so many other convenient things.

I also want to start forming a loose team of creative talent (hairstylists/wardrobe stylists/makeup artists/etc.) that I can work with on a regular basis. I meet so many people, but in this industry you often just work with someone once and then you never see them again. You kind of just stalk each other’s work and travels on Instagram after that and hope that you’ll run into them again in a year or something…haha. I want to be more proactive about establishing strong connections and mutually building each other up through continued collaboration. I shot with this photographer recently, who was Steven Meisel’s assistant. He was telling me about working in New York during the golden age of fashion, the Studio 54 days, the era of the supermodels – and he pointed out kind of as a joke that “Back in those days, you drank together and you were part of the crew. So everyone would drink and smoke and party together, and then we would all go to work with our friends. These days, there’s not that type of networking culture. People come and go really quickly and just do their own thing. Everyone here is too focused on health and fitness, they wouldn’t do what we used to do!” Okay, obviously I am not trying to start living the drinking and drugs lifestyle, but I do see the point he’s making, that people achieve greatness together when they form deep, lasting friendships with each other. You can do so much more with a team of creative minds that you have probed and explored and have great chemistry with.

Let’s explore some of the challenges you’ve faced along the way. What was the most difficult part of your career so far?
If you were to ask me what my greatest fear in life is, I would say not being good at the things I do. It maybe sounds weird to some people because it doesn’t have anything to do with death or family or love or any of that. But my happiness is so tied to the activities I do that I feel very depressed and lost if I’m not doing these creative activities or if I feel like I’ve failed in it somehow.

I rarely talk about this because it was such a dark time for me, but I wanted to commit suicide when I was in college. I had just made the decision to switch my primary degree from Percussion Performance to a major in Communications, and at that point in my life I couldn’t handle the mentality change that had to come with it. All my life, I’d been a musician and pretty much only a musician. I started studying piano when I was 4, competing for many years, started violin when I was 7 and played in the Boston Youth Symphony, and after picking up percussion in middle school, I devoted my life to practicing and auditions and performing and teaching and never looked back. I developed this unhealthy mentality where the very core of my identity was based on how successful of a musician I felt I was. If my hands were bad that day or I had a bad lesson, I would be so shaken up. I would cry in my room for hours. I made the decision to add Communications as sort of a totally unrelated outlet, so that I could ease the pressure on myself a bit. But the way my situation was at Northwestern by the time I made this decision, I had to switch my actual degree to Communications and focus on taking all the classes I had barely enough time left to finish.

Maybe it was just all in my head, but I felt like I had failed myself as a musician somehow. I read an article recently about musicians working at Starbucks or other jobs to make ends meet and how there shouldn’t be a stigma around that. I really wish I had read that article back then. But anyway over time I developed a new, healthier mentality on things. I realized that making music, making art, all that is yours forever – it doesn’t matter if you do something else to pay the bills, and it definitely doesn’t make you any less of a musician or artist. In fact, I feel like I became far more creative and worked on more collaborations than before once I learned to not stress out about how good I was like it was a life or death battle, and just did things for the pure joy of making and sharing art.

I am grateful that I came to this essential realization before I started dabbling in photography. Photography was never tainted by the twisted mental hardships I had with my music career early on, and because of that I think I am able to grow in a healthier way. I meet all kinds of people and find myself in stressful or discouraging situations from time to time, but I don’t take any of that too seriously anymore. I just tell myself it’s part of the industry and part of the process. If I need a break from it for a while, I just take a break. I have lots of other hobbies I’m constantly developing and working on. I’m never going to let the negative aspects override the joy I get from being a photographer, or else I might as well just quit.

Are there days when you feel like you’ve done everything you wanted to, careerwise – the “I’ve made it” kind of moments?
I’m nowhere close to having an “I made it” moment when it comes to photography, but I do have little moments where I realize I’ve made progress. Sometimes I’ll shoot a blogger and then later on I’ll stumble upon her website and see my photos being used everywhere, and I always get a little excited when I see that. Or when they write about me as the photographer and describe my style, I always feel happy about the acknowledgment. I’m also like, wait what I have a style? I don’t even know what that is, I feel like I’m still trying to find it!

Also, I spend a lot of time browsing other photographers’ work on Instagram, and over time I’ve realized that certain photographers I used to look up to aren’t…well, I don’t want to say that they’re not as good as I thought, but I guess I just got better. Like I realize that I can totally emulate their style of editing or have equally dope ideas, and that’s a pretty good feeling when you realize that too.

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