Coming together through joy and grief
- Paige Young
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
Interview with Paige Young
1. Please tell us something about your background and your art journey so far.
My name is Paige Young. I actually was interested in music much as a child before I ever considered visual art. My art teachers always said I was talented with painting and drawing, but I was raised more around boys and a mom that was gifted with music, so it took me some time to really accept visual art culture into my life since sports and music seemed to be at the center of my upbringing. I began to photograph for fun around 16, and really got into it around 18 when I started to intern for a local studio photographer. At the same time, I was attending college for black and white film photography and was majoring to become a psychologist. Long story short, I fell in love with the way I made people feel in front of my lens and saw a huge connection between psychology and the camera, and decided to fully commit to visual art.
Within the last 15 years I pursued a double masters within the fine arts in Photography and Visual and Critical Studies. With these degrees I have been able to teach at the University level, while also running my own photography business, APaige Photography for the last 16 years. I have always loved fine art, but it has been a bit harder to get into, and for some reason the fine art culture really does not like commercial artists doing both. However, you have to fund your art somehow, so teaching and photographing weddings is legitimately how I can fund my work to be sent internationally or buy film to continuously photograph for my projects.
2. Describe what a normal day looks like as an artist.
My days are very slammed as an artist. I wish I were the type of artist that had a slow day, and randomly got inspired to make work on a whim, but my brain does not function in that way. I basically have two full time jobs, a professor and a photographer, and on the side I am a fine art artist. However, I am slowly switching gears to place my fine art in the middle of the spectrum, as I have been traveling more world wide to my exhibitions rather than just sending my art off in the mail and looking forward to images coming to my email from the openings.
I do have autism, so I do love lists and routines. My mornings usually consist of working out, grounding my body, drinking coffee, and then editing my commercial work while listening to an audio book. Around 1pm I switch gears and turn my attention to my fine art work. Whether that is making work, cutting mats, emailing curators, or once a week I apply to shows that are applicable to my work. During the school year my week days are filled with student obligations so these tasks get a bit reduced or thrown on the weekends.
3. Can you tell us more about the theme in your art and your inspiration?
My themes and inspirations range in topic - however at the core of it all is human experience and empathy. In graduate school I really grappled with my eating disorder. I thought I was making work about not being good enough, and feeling like an alien in my own body, but really I was making work about overcoming anorexia. I still think about body image every day in all of the work I do, but I make it a bit more vague and have more symbolism compared to what I used to do.
More so in the last year I have produced work that links to equality of marginalized communities, and human experiences linked to joy and grief. Our world and specifically, my country, feels so divided right now, and I feel so hopeless in it. Critical thought feels limited and empathy is lacking in every area around me. As a wedding photographer, I see hundreds of people a weekend, and I don’t align with many of these people, yet I can still outreach kindness. I go to every wedding thinking about the ‘last time’ people may be together. As I have aged and lost people, my fine art work really hones in on these emotions. I focus on the last times we may see people we love and the moments we’ll forget without an image to remind us, and so obviously this has grown from my daily work in the wedding industry.
There are 3 important segments to my work [in my eyes]. The first part is the ‘mundane’ portraits, landscapes, and fun projects I do that keep me alive. These are the images I take that remind me why I am alive. The images that help me stop and smell the flowers. I don’t let them suck me in and forget that I am there, I don’t let them make me view the world only through a lens, I document and take a moment to look at the world around me without my camera. I talk to my students about how important it is that you capture your own life, especially as a photographer hired to photograph for others. My landscape work varies from digital to film - and to be honest I love film more because I typically just take one image and put down my camera without fixating on it being perfect because I don’t want to waste film.
The second part of my work is equality and representation. No matter who is in front of my lens I want them to feel comfortable and like I am a home to them. Photographing is one of the most intimate experiences someone can go through. It’s so vulnerable and it can make or break someone’s self-esteem. There is so much psychology linked between how we see ourselves and how we are interacted with during the act of being photographed - not even how the end result turns out. My goal is to always be the light, the comfort, and someone that feels like a best friend. I love love, and I love representing all people - no matter what. All communities deserve to be represented equally, and history tells us why that is so important.
The third part is humanity. Loss and Grief. With loss and grief, also comes joy and happiness. These emotions are not linked to before and after, but during and are cyclical. People chuckle during funerals, cry at weddings, burst out in laughter in memory of someone who passed, and those are the big emotions that make us human. Our society at this very moment is very quick to blame, hate, and strip humanity of anything that resembles being human - so I have really honed in on my own grief, passing, and confusion in identity within loss, and have posed some questions to my viewer. I want people to see my own loss and joy and identify with their own. This is the only way I can see us coming together, if we remember that we also can feel the same pain that is being implemented to others around the world.
4. Tell us about your best and worst experience in the art world so far. My experience with the art world has been up and down. It can be pretty elitist, but so can academia. I find what galleries like to place in their galleries to be frustrating at times. I have been making fine art contemporary work for 15-20 years now, but just within the last 2 years my work has really blown up internationally. Why now? Because my topic changed. With my topic change, I also decided to change my medium to be more hands on in the darkroom and go back to my roots of photography rather than digitally producing and this also interested curators. I guess the more frustrating part about that is that my work before was about hard hitting topics like minority representation and body image. I would have to brainstorm my concepts deeply beforehand and I would spend a lot of money and time on the production to see little return. However, now that I am making film work and darkroom reproduction imagery while focusing on grief and everyday moments, it is leaning on experimentation and letting go of perfection, which feels backwards in my brain. Both of these topics and techniques take different skill sets, but what I have been doing lately takes a bit more paying attention to the original shooting vs really laying out a firm concept of what I’m doing while I’m photographing. I am looking for emotions rather than ‘why.’
5. Is the artist life lonely? Please share your thoughts and experiences.
The artist life can be lonely, which is why I have made a few really good friends in the wedding industry that body double with me when I edit [meaning when we are both editing, we facetime so we can edit together], and we can chat about work, our edits or art. I also am a part of a group called Long Live Film and it is a group full of Film Photographers who talk about art daily. Finally, one of the main reasons I teach is to stay in connection with contemporary art, continuously learn about new artists, trends and styles, and to be in a space that provides me with constant discussion on art. Without these things, it can get pretty hard to produce new work for myself.
6. What are you working on at the moment and are there any upcoming events you would like to talk about?
Upcoming I have work that will be on display in Florence, Italy from October 18-25! It is two of my ‘It died with you’ pieces, and another ‘Moment’s Ill remember, memories you’ll forget.’ I also have a handful of other shows coming up that include full installations - one called ‘what if I told you,’ which includes an installation of all of my medicine bottles that are my prescriptions for my mental health being illuminated that allow the viewers to send messages to each other. The installation is still discussing grief, but more so the inability to feel it when you are medicated, though without the medication, you may not be here at all. Next year I also will be in a gallery in Paris, France on April 10-12 showcasing my work as well. I have many exciting things coming up for my career - and some I can’t speak of quite yet. But I am making a ton of new work currently, and have plans to continue to do so.
Instagram commercial: @apaigephotography
Fine art: @paigekyoung
Website commercial: www.apaigephotography.com
Website fine art: www.paigekyoung.com
Landscape for purchase: https://paigekyoung.mypixieset.com/printsforpurchase/