I have mixed feelings about this guy and the crowd of new explorers he represents. Without a doubt, he's a good photographer and has some very nice images. Nothing he is doing is ground breaking, although everyone seems to think so. He's over-using VSCO filters in almost every single photo, and stuck on the square format low rez platform of instagram, but hey, he's 17 and "trendy" in both his photography and his ridiculous skinny sweats. Really, sweats in public?
Street photography that's jumped on the recent popularization of urbex and is gathering lots of attention using social media platforms seems to be a recent path to "success" as an artist, whatever that means.
I found this interesting video:
http://new.livestr...n=LivestreamPublic At least these guys aren't the stereotypical art fag, pompous, bullshit spouting egoists, which is a breath of fresh air. They seem pretty down to earth actually.
At 16 minutes in, Humza says,
"I saw this video of these two guys climbing a tower over in Shanghai. It popped in my head, no one is doing this in New York City. At that time I followed over 2000 instagram accounts... but this side I never saw."
No one is doing this in New York City. Wow. I guess you didn't search very hard, or search at all, and hey, BTW Instagram isn't typically where serious photographers publish their images (although this is changing due to the social media power that site has.) Hey, we're an underground subculture, but not that underground. Do you think he honestly thought to himself "I'm the first person doing this in NY"??? I'd like to chalk this up to being 17, but... I started hacking computers at age 14 in 1990, and without much difficulty, I was soon connected with the underground hacking scene and going to 2600 meetings and hanging out on multi-day international telephone conferences etc. And this was before the web existed, so, well, what's my point again? Meaning, it's not that hard to find us if you actually try.
I'm not gonna hate on the guy though, as he's getting it done just as much as the rest of us. Faddy photography for a faddy audience, but, when it comes down to it, us guys over here, we're really not that much different other than that we were doing it before it was a "fad". This doesn't really make us any better or any worse. My publicity and photography has inspired some people in Cali to get into this scene, but that doesn't make them any less cool IMHO. In the end, it's all about your personality, how you interact with others in the scene, how you represent the rest of us, and if you're into it because it's a fad, or if you're just into it because it's cool; which it is.
In the end, we're all somewhat responsible for this new crowd of people engaging in our hobby, as we're the ones publishing the cool pictures and videos for the world to see. So, when the world sees it and reacts by replicating what we did, why do we not like them? We created them.
-freeside
-edit-
Well, after watching the rest of the video, Humza doesn't impress with his interview and what he has to say. He considers his photography totally unique. He really is out of touch with the people who came before him in this thing. He goes on say "It's pretty nerve wrecking (sic) especially nowadays how the NYPD doesn't like when people do that stuff. Because it's been on the news, it's been on blogs, it has the media attention..." "Because now you have to watch out for NYPD or whoever else is watching you."
Drrrr. I wonder if these people are smart enough to realize that they are the reason that there is more heat on the scene than there ever was before???
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