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Writer's pictureJaamZIN Creative
Dec 29, 20191 min read

Portrait photographer Aks Huckleberry


Her first smoke (series with my grandmother) My grand mother used to be a professional typist for the Soviet party in her youth & she still has some remains of her professional past lying around, such as ancient but working typewriters. For me, this aspect of her persona is closely associated with her identity & I wanted to shoot a series of portraits that had a humorous take on that. By re-appropriating the symbolic elements of her past (lace, crystal vessels, type writer & old school tattoos) and bringing in the semiotics of a modern hair cut and a cigarette, which she hasn’t smoked prior to this shoot, I wanted to make the portrait series modern and dynamic, but still having that timeless old school feel about it with the film grain & her overall appearance. My grandmother is very shy, but incredibly brave – as soon as we started shooting, she opened up & transformed into this cheeky, cocky, confident woman, casually smoking cigarettes, which she bummed off my brother.
Her first smoke (series with my grandmother) My grand mother used to be a professional typist for the Soviet party in her youth & she still has some remains of her professional past lying around, such as ancient but working typewriters. For me, this aspect of her persona is closely associated with her identity & I wanted to shoot a series of portraits that had a humorous take on that. By re-appropriating the symbolic elements of her past (lace, crystal vessels, type writer & old school tattoos) and bringing in the semiotics of a modern hair cut and a cigarette, which she hasn’t smoked prior to this shoot, I wanted to make the portrait series modern and dynamic, but still having that timeless old school feel about it with the film grain & her overall appearance. My grandmother is very shy, but incredibly brave – as soon as we started shooting, she opened up & transformed into this cheeky, cocky, confident woman, casually smoking cigarettes, which she bummed off my brother.

Born in a tiny southern town of Russia, Aks Huckleberry is a young film maker and a portrait photographer, who for the past several years has been working as a freelancer in between London & Moscow and internationally. Aks predominantly uses natural light & organic elements in her portrait work.

Self-portrait as a Tin Soldier A friend of mine does a lot of re-enactments & has a ton of props and costumes lying around his house. I came over to visit him last summer & found this replica uniform of a 19th century British infantry soldier. Instantly, I wanted to shoot a self-portrait dressed up in the gear, but highlighting my sexuality & femininity. We set up a camp in the garden & shot it in front of his house before the wind blew me away.
Self-portrait as a Tin Soldier A friend of mine does a lot of re-enactments & has a ton of props and costumes lying around his house. I came over to visit him last summer & found this replica uniform of a 19th century British infantry soldier. Instantly, I wanted to shoot a self-portrait dressed up in the gear, but highlighting my sexuality & femininity. We set up a camp in the garden & shot it in front of his house before the wind blew me away.

Whenever and wherever she travels, she takes a moving portrait of the place, which includes her family, friends & strangers she encounters on her journey – the majority of the work is not staged, but is about capturing the mood, the atmosphere and the beauty of the place and memories of the people involved in it, through the prism of her vision.

Hidden Sugar We shot Hidden Sugar in Berlin a couple of winters ago. This series is a portrait collaboration with MUA Ben Dniprowskij & muse Tanya Wenczel for Untainted Mag: "The brief set was to create a beauty editorial of 4 – 6 images around the theme of: “A Feast for Gluttony” and create the looks using only edible ingredients/products. They were asked to use what was already in their kits and kitchens in order to step outside of their comfort zone & experiment with makeup unconventionally. The objective was not to buy more stuff, but use up what we already have and begin to think differently about the ingredients in our beauty products." Ben spent over a week testing the products on the mask moulds & ended up using things like marshmallow & spirulina for these looks, cursing all the way through the application. It was one of the hardest shoots I've done for everyone involved - the lighting in winter Berlin is horrific, I had to shoot every look ultra fast; the model was half suffocating half drowning in all the ingredients & Ben was struggling with attaching all of this concoction to the model's face. The resultant images, however, have a beautifully haunting feel about them & prove that sometimes you gotta suffer for your art.
Hidden Sugar We shot Hidden Sugar in Berlin a couple of winters ago. This series is a portrait collaboration with MUA Ben Dniprowskij & muse Tanya Wenczel for Untainted Mag: "The brief set was to create a beauty editorial of 4 – 6 images around the theme of: “A Feast for Gluttony” and create the looks using only edible ingredients/products. They were asked to use what was already in their kits and kitchens in order to step outside of their comfort zone & experiment with makeup unconventionally. The objective was not to buy more stuff, but use up what we already have and begin to think differently about the ingredients in our beauty products." Ben spent over a week testing the products on the mask moulds & ended up using things like marshmallow & spirulina for these looks, cursing all the way through the application. It was one of the hardest shoots I've done for everyone involved - the lighting in winter Berlin is horrific, I had to shoot every look ultra fast; the model was half suffocating half drowning in all the ingredients & Ben was struggling with attaching all of this concoction to the model's face. The resultant images, however, have a beautifully haunting feel about them & prove that sometimes you gotta suffer for your art.

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