We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Amanda Austin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Amanda below.

Amanda, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I feel like it’s only through hindsight that we can process and understand our own experiences, how we became to be how we are, and able to trace the journey to the place we find ourselves. Looking back over this wild ride I can see that I was always destined or somehow craving to take an artistic path. The need to push at the boundaries of what we find constrains us, questioning everything and constantly changing and shaking down life around us to find our own truth and contextualize the world with an openness, is what I believe is what makes an artist and what naturally drives just some people to an artistic or creative path and definitely why I now see how I ended up in a creative career.

Amanda, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My career for nearly 20 years has been primarily in photography. In my early 20’s I left my writing degree to travel the world for as long as I could. I didn’t know where I wanted to drive my career and didn’t feel like I understood enough about myself or the world around me to make such a weighty decision. My belief was, if I could travel openly and just be in the world, maybe those questions would just naturally answer themselves and I would find my way to a career that I was passionately connected to through experience and serendipity, not logic based on survival and what I had been advised by others was a safe choice. From perspective I can see that I was right, not that it ever felt very clear, but traveling enabled me to move through the world and see what in turn moved me, without any attachment or preconceptions. Meeting an art student in Paris studying photography was a pivotal moment. I was given a camera to borrow and some film, taught the basics, and from the very first day I set out on the streets, concentrating on exposure, focus and composition, I was completely enraptured.

I purchased my first camera in Europe, a Canon AE1, that I still own and love to this day, and set off to Asia for as long as I could last. The images that came from this period, of wandering happily with my camera, learning and crafting my own eye without any real training or expectations, became what opened the door to the path of my creative career. A highly esteemed photographer saw my photos by chance and suggested to another artist I knew that I should apply for a photography scholarship. I did just that and was awarded a 1 year scholarship to one of the last hand printing art courses in the city. This course showed me just how passionate I was about photography and gave me the technical base needed to work in the industry, as well as the space to further develop my aesthetic in a new way.

Beginning as a photographers assistant and lighting technician was a great way to learn the craft in a professional setting and just how the elusive industry works. There did seem to be a clear general divide within the industry between advertising and the fashion, arts, music and culture markets and whatever clients you get in either arena would establish your commercial folio and with that your market and the area you will naturally work within. My first big client was a well known fashion brand. I worked with them consistently for over 7 years and they were a very defining force in my trajectory, they gave me a lot of creative freedom and my style was very shaped from that period. Most of the clients and publications that I worked with in the first decade or so of my career can be somehow traced back to that one client.

People in general became my speciality and fashion, music and portraiture became the field in which I produced in most prolifically. My natural ability to look for the honesty in life, beauty, and people drew an authenticity from my subjects and a sense of naturalism and effortlessness from a female perspective defined my work in a unique way and is what I have always been most hired to represent, for what is nearing nearly two decades.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I had the passion and drive to create a magazine platform called IRIS Magazine. The conception was in 2011, it launched, against all odds, in 2017. This project was all about resilience and dedication. So many areas of the magazine industry have completely re-shaped within this time. Our desire to create a more immersive digital experience and celebrate long-form multimedia articles, pushing out from the still image toward moving image in unique and experimental ways was my focus. So many of the ideas put forward and content created at a time when there was no precedent for them, I now see as accepted, well utilized, and embraced by leading publications today. This project from start to finish was all about resilience.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

There has never been a more pertinent time for the arts to be supported. So much time in developing creativity and art for it to be diminished and downgraded in the commercial channels due to the ease and cost effective efficiency of technology and profit targets. There needs to be more support for a wider range of artists and creatives within society and I feel culture in general should be more prioritized, especially in bigger cities. The burden of needing to make a decent living is the fastest way to diminish the passion that has the power to create amazing things, feel deeply, and innovate within the arts. More development and innovation from all areas to fund and stimulate artists and creatives is so necessary in ensuring a future rich in culture and community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://amandaaustin.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaaustinphotography/
• Other: http://www.irismagazine.com

Image Credits
all images by Amanda Austin