Small talk with Photographer Estelle Yoon
How important do you think is the ability to be able to express yourself visually (through what you wear, how you choose to style yourself and how you wish to portray yourself to the world) and how does this link to your work?
The ability to express myself visually is considered one of the most important things for me personally. How I present myself to the world through fashion and style can be based on my mood or can be the other way around, embedding a particular or desired mood. Visual expression through garments and image withholds a certain degree of power in the way it influences and questions the notion of self-reflection and the inevitable “brand” of myself as the surrounding world perceives me via these elements of visual form. This directly links to my work of photography as how I style myself stylises the way I move through capturing visual poetry and musicalities and helps me further understand and establish relationships with the interplay of colours, light and shadow, composition, setting and subject matter.
As you may know APRVD stands for that “inbetweener” position that is so prominent in today’s world. How important do you think is to stay connected to your roots whilst building your own individual identity?
I had related deeply with the label “inbetweener” for a long period of my life, especially through my teenage years growing up in Australia within a Korean household, experiencing forms of external and internal alienation and identity crisis. However, through exploring, accepting and connecting more and more to my roots and heritage have aided me to embrace this term and nurture my thoughts and feelings surrounding this word to grow, and it has eventually gifted me the ability to recognise and continuously build my own sense of unique voice and individuality.
