My name is Rob Burrowes. I’m 25, originally from Wellington and currently based in Auckland, Aotearoa. I’m mainly into portraiture and fashion editorial photography, but I do a bunch of other things like directing, producing and painting which are all just other ways of expressing myself.
How did your love of photography come about?
I first got introduced to photography in 2011 by John Bozinov: who is now a super talented arctic photographer. He was interested in Holga at the time, a cheap plastic 120 film camera. He gave me one of them to learn on. I never had a digital camera before that, so it was my first proper camera.
In retrospect it was an amazing camera to learn photography with because it had no electronic elements. So you had to learn everything from scratch. Advancing the film, doing your own metering and focus, loading and unloading. I think the real utility of that camera was it was so prone to errors that you had to learn the hard way about photographic principals.
The back was so flimsy and would sometimes just fall off and expose your whole roll, or you’d load it incorrectly ruin another roll. The camera was super prone to light leaks and other weird quirks and it quickly made me understand the inputs and outputs in a very visceral way. I had that thing all taped up to prevent the leaks and guides on the back of the camera to make sure I was getting my exposure right with every frame.
Photography stayed as a hobby until high school photography teacher recommended I enter a photography competition with Canon. I ended up winning it overall and they gave me a camera. It definitely felt like a nod of approval from the “industry” or whatever you want to call it and ultimately gave me the confidence to pursue photography seriously. Not long after I got my first professional job for Fader Mag in NYC. I didn’t even know how to edit properly at that stage, they ended up editing them for me which is kind of hilarious in retrospect but I was only 16.
What are some of the different shooting techniques and processes you experiment with?
When I first started with the Holga, I got super experimental. You can ‘hack’ load 35mm film into it and expose the sprockets. Or you could make a ‘holgarama’, a panorama by manually advancing the film and stitching all your frames together on one long piece of film. I did lots of mucking around with exposures, light leaks, cross-processing, weird film, I tried it all back then. More recently I’ve been playing with medium format and playing around with dark room printing, both fine arts that I’m yet to master!
What are your current camera setup and favourite film?
My current set up for 120 is my Pentax 67II, usually using Portra 400. If I’m working with BW it would be ACROS 100. For 35mm, I use my Canon 1V, but haven’t shot 35mm in awhile!
How do you find the motivation to continue to go out and pursue your creative endeavours?
I feel like that constant pursuit of perfection in my work is super motivating. Us artists can be our own worst critics at times, which kind of sparks that endless spiral of trying to be better than your last photo. I feel like a lot of the time I’m still learning, each time I take a photo I’m learning something new. Could be as simple as figuring out how to light something, or as complex as how communicate more meaningfully. But its always a process!
Where do you see yourself in 5 – 10 years time with your photography and video work?
The main things is I don’t want to lose my roots and why I first got interested in being a creative. I think it’s very easy to go down the different paths and lose your way a bit. I want to make work the 16 year old me would love.
That means creating with purpose, rather than external for accolades or money. Being the most authentic I can, whilst being able to make a living and be a good person sounds pretty good. If we are talking goals, I’d love to be living overseas shooting campaigns and editorials.
At times I find the fashion/music industry very exhausting, so trying to stay healthy and sane amongst all of that. In film, I would love to be directing films, documentary or meaningful forms of advertising.
What advice would you give to your younger self given your experience in life so far?
If you’re looking for direction: Stay true your own inner voice, if you haven’t found what truly makes your heart sing, just keep looking.
When you know what you want: Back yourself fully, resist comparison with others and stay the course. However slow you may inch toward your goals, being consistent is better than not at all.
If you’re struggling for opportunities: The universe is never going to hand you a golden opportunity you want on a platter. You need to create your own opportunities, your own path and your own voice unique to you. Then people might listen.
Are there artists you look up to or admire?
Nick Knight is huge for me, he’s really the lighting god. The entire Sorrenti family I feel are just photography royalty really. A couple favourites are Jack Bridgland, Jonas Lindstroem, Dan Beleiu, Jeremy Snell and Min Yunwoo who are all fantastic. In terms of big names: Wong Kar Wai, Scorsese, Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Helmut Newton, Roger Deakins. Stanley Kubrick and Steve Jobs I think have had an influence on the obsessive perfectionism side of me.
Locally, I think Nicole Brannen and Matt Hurley are just absolutely killing it always. They’re the best two photographers in Aotearoa in my opinion. Masters of film and lighting respectively. It’s so awesome to see young kiwi creatives do so well in your own backyard.
Peter Jackson and Taika Waititis’s origin stories have always touched me growing up in Wellington. Both their first films I feel made me feel like being from a small town in the bottom of the world you can really create awesome things. Their attitude toward what they do definitely made me believe I can do it too.
What about film keeps drawing you back?
I think it’s that element of surprise and wonder still get you even after shooting film for years. You never know what you’re going to get back from the lab. It has that element of delayed gratification that taking a photo on a iPhone just can’t give you. It still almost hard to believe the colours, character and charm that can come out in a film image. You almost feel like you’re cheating a little bit when the film just gives you something you weren’t expecting.
Sometimes you’re so pleasantly surprised you actually took that image, sometimes it can give you something you weren’t intending and I think that just adds an another element of creativity and fun to the whole process. You can never really replicate that film feeling, it’s so organic and has a realness to it that a digital image can’t capture. You feel like you’re actually in the room with a portrait, or in the environment of a landscape. It’s just raw.
What are some things about the darkroom process that inspire you?
Recently I’ve also been learning the dark art of the darkroom process, from the master himself Lorenzo. What’s surprised me so much about the darkroom process is that its just like digital editing. You learn these processes in Photoshop or Lightroom and then you release they were all born in the darkroom before digital was a thing. There’s so much freedom in there and such a huge scope to experiment.
It gives you so much space for creativity in a hands on way, it feels like you’re still shooting a little bit because you’re not sitting down behind a computer, you’re doing things with your hands and you limited by things like time and really need to think on your feet. It’s organic and you can see it’s an art form. An image doesn’t load up on a screen, it develops before your eyes. You can really see the subtly of minor changes in liquid or timing, rather than with a slider or a curve graph. I love how human it is. I’m looking forward to brining the darkroom process into my workflow even more.
Where can we view more and keep up to date with your photography?
Best place to see my work is at https://www.robburrowes.com/. But you can also keep up to date on instagram @robburrowes
Artist Interview – Rob Burrowes
Tell us a little bit about yourself!
My name is Rob Burrowes. I’m 25, originally from Wellington and currently based in Auckland, Aotearoa. I’m mainly into portraiture and fashion editorial photography, but I do a bunch of other things like directing, producing and painting which are all just other ways of expressing myself.
How did your love of photography come about?
I first got introduced to photography in 2011 by John Bozinov: who is now a super talented arctic photographer. He was interested in Holga at the time, a cheap plastic 120 film camera. He gave me one of them to learn on. I never had a digital camera before that, so it was my first proper camera.
In retrospect it was an amazing camera to learn photography with because it had no electronic elements. So you had to learn everything from scratch. Advancing the film, doing your own metering and focus, loading and unloading. I think the real utility of that camera was it was so prone to errors that you had to learn the hard way about photographic principals.
The back was so flimsy and would sometimes just fall off and expose your whole roll, or you’d load it incorrectly ruin another roll. The camera was super prone to light leaks and other weird quirks and it quickly made me understand the inputs and outputs in a very visceral way. I had that thing all taped up to prevent the leaks and guides on the back of the camera to make sure I was getting my exposure right with every frame.
Photography stayed as a hobby until high school photography teacher recommended I enter a photography competition with Canon. I ended up winning it overall and they gave me a camera. It definitely felt like a nod of approval from the “industry” or whatever you want to call it and ultimately gave me the confidence to pursue photography seriously. Not long after I got my first professional job for Fader Mag in NYC. I didn’t even know how to edit properly at that stage, they ended up editing them for me which is kind of hilarious in retrospect but I was only 16.
What are some of the different shooting techniques and processes you experiment with?
When I first started with the Holga, I got super experimental. You can ‘hack’ load 35mm film into it and expose the sprockets. Or you could make a ‘holgarama’, a panorama by manually advancing the film and stitching all your frames together on one long piece of film. I did lots of mucking around with exposures, light leaks, cross-processing, weird film, I tried it all back then. More recently I’ve been playing with medium format and playing around with dark room printing, both fine arts that I’m yet to master!
What are your current camera setup and favourite film?
My current set up for 120 is my Pentax 67II, usually using Portra 400. If I’m working with BW it would be ACROS 100. For 35mm, I use my Canon 1V, but haven’t shot 35mm in awhile!
How do you find the motivation to continue to go out and pursue your creative endeavours?
I feel like that constant pursuit of perfection in my work is super motivating. Us artists can be our own worst critics at times, which kind of sparks that endless spiral of trying to be better than your last photo. I feel like a lot of the time I’m still learning, each time I take a photo I’m learning something new. Could be as simple as figuring out how to light something, or as complex as how communicate more meaningfully. But its always a process!
Where do you see yourself in 5 – 10 years time with your photography and video work?
The main things is I don’t want to lose my roots and why I first got interested in being a creative. I think it’s very easy to go down the different paths and lose your way a bit. I want to make work the 16 year old me would love.
That means creating with purpose, rather than external for accolades or money. Being the most authentic I can, whilst being able to make a living and be a good person sounds pretty good. If we are talking goals, I’d love to be living overseas shooting campaigns and editorials.
At times I find the fashion/music industry very exhausting, so trying to stay healthy and sane amongst all of that. In film, I would love to be directing films, documentary or meaningful forms of advertising.
What advice would you give to your younger self given your experience in life so far?
If you’re looking for direction: Stay true your own inner voice, if you haven’t found what truly makes your heart sing, just keep looking.
When you know what you want: Back yourself fully, resist comparison with others and stay the course. However slow you may inch toward your goals, being consistent is better than not at all.
If you’re struggling for opportunities: The universe is never going to hand you a golden opportunity you want on a platter. You need to create your own opportunities, your own path and your own voice unique to you. Then people might listen.
Are there artists you look up to or admire?
Nick Knight is huge for me, he’s really the lighting god. The entire Sorrenti family I feel are just photography royalty really. A couple favourites are Jack Bridgland, Jonas Lindstroem, Dan Beleiu, Jeremy Snell and Min Yunwoo who are all fantastic. In terms of big names: Wong Kar Wai, Scorsese, Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Helmut Newton, Roger Deakins. Stanley Kubrick and Steve Jobs I think have had an influence on the obsessive perfectionism side of me.
Locally, I think Nicole Brannen and Matt Hurley are just absolutely killing it always. They’re the best two photographers in Aotearoa in my opinion. Masters of film and lighting respectively. It’s so awesome to see young kiwi creatives do so well in your own backyard.
Peter Jackson and Taika Waititis’s origin stories have always touched me growing up in Wellington. Both their first films I feel made me feel like being from a small town in the bottom of the world you can really create awesome things. Their attitude toward what they do definitely made me believe I can do it too.
What about film keeps drawing you back?
I think it’s that element of surprise and wonder still get you even after shooting film for years. You never know what you’re going to get back from the lab. It has that element of delayed gratification that taking a photo on a iPhone just can’t give you. It still almost hard to believe the colours, character and charm that can come out in a film image. You almost feel like you’re cheating a little bit when the film just gives you something you weren’t expecting.
Sometimes you’re so pleasantly surprised you actually took that image, sometimes it can give you something you weren’t intending and I think that just adds an another element of creativity and fun to the whole process. You can never really replicate that film feeling, it’s so organic and has a realness to it that a digital image can’t capture. You feel like you’re actually in the room with a portrait, or in the environment of a landscape. It’s just raw.
What are some things about the darkroom process that inspire you?
Recently I’ve also been learning the dark art of the darkroom process, from the master himself Lorenzo. What’s surprised me so much about the darkroom process is that its just like digital editing. You learn these processes in Photoshop or Lightroom and then you release they were all born in the darkroom before digital was a thing. There’s so much freedom in there and such a huge scope to experiment.
It gives you so much space for creativity in a hands on way, it feels like you’re still shooting a little bit because you’re not sitting down behind a computer, you’re doing things with your hands and you limited by things like time and really need to think on your feet. It’s organic and you can see it’s an art form. An image doesn’t load up on a screen, it develops before your eyes. You can really see the subtly of minor changes in liquid or timing, rather than with a slider or a curve graph. I love how human it is. I’m looking forward to brining the darkroom process into my workflow even more.
Where can we view more and keep up to date with your photography?
Best place to see my work is at https://www.robburrowes.com/. But you can also keep up to date on instagram @robburrowes