Click and Connect: Interview with Medway photographer Michi Masumi
Medway photographer and artist Michi Masumi on allowing emotion and heritage to guide her imagery
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
Based at the studios in Chatham’s Nucleus Arts, Michi Masumi has been delving into the world of creation for many years. From silversmithing and making bespoke jewellery to designing unique clothing and accessories, writing poetry and even singing. But when she moved her family to Medway a decade ago she found a new passion – photography.
Currently studying for a PHD and researching black aesthetics and intersectionality within British art, Michi is also the founder of the Black Art Hub, which provides a platform for grassroots black British visual artists and poets to share experiences and exhibit their work.
Interweaving the images she captures and using digital techniques to harness energy and inflame imagination, Michi looks to reflect day-to-day life and culture as well as celebrate her Britishness alongside her African, Caribbean and Ecuadorian heritage.
Michi’s first foray into camera work came at university in Rochester as the mum of 10 searched for her own unique style in the world of fine art.
“I’ve always said to my children there’s no such thing as ‘you can’t’ – it’s better to try and fail than to never try,” says Michi. “And so because I’m a self-taught photographer, even though I’ve now got a Master’s degree and I’m doing my doctorate, I had to do double the work that most people did because I had never touched the camera in my life, I had no understanding of it, I couldn’t afford a camera.
“[At university] I was learning the technical theories behind photography because they didn’t teach us how to take photos, and I just thought this direction I’m going in is really making me understand that I’m an expressionist artist and that I like to express myself.
“That could be part of my neurodivergency, it could be part of the fact that I’ve always struggled with mental health, and I can use this to express myself. And so I took a photo portrait of a friend and a floral shot in my garden and I merged them. And I loved it.”
You could say that was the flashbulb moment.
“It was something that I had been doing but not showing to anyone,” says Michi. “And one day I put it online and I said ‘I think it’s fine art’, and everyone went nuts.”
Michi saw an advert to submit her image to the London Photography Awards under the title ‘Not all that glitters is gold’.
“It was about mental health. And I wanted to reflect how judgmental society is. If someone’s got money and they’re maybe classed as rich, we tend to almost dismiss their mental-health suffering because they happen to have more money than the norm.”
Using layering techniques with gold and silver, Michi submitted it and received the Student: Honourable Mention Silver Award for Fine Art. Paired with positive feedback from other photographers, she was encouraged to continue her methods and, a year on, she regularly exhibits her work across Medway, Kent and the South East.
PROCESS
Influenced by photographers like Irving Penn and Gordon Parks, Michi’s process has seen her portraiture-style photography develop into a more three-dimensional and enhanced final product.
From merging imagery to adding layers, illustrations and even poetry, she has an armful of creative methods that help to turn her photos into a representation of her emotions.
“The biggest challenge is having the concept in my head and getting it on to some kind of platform for me to play around with,” explains Michi. “So, usually for me, my camera is my blank canvas. So if you can think of a painter, they usually have the canvases, different painters start off slightly differently, they paint the background or do outlines. For me, that’s the photography side. I have a concept or an emotional feeling – I allow my camera to connect with how I feel. And all of a sudden I realised how I’m feeling visually because it’s right there in front of me.
And that’s probably my favourite way of working, spontaneously, because I think then you get more of the truth and the rawness rather than planning. I’m not a ‘plan’ photographer, I hate that.”
If working with models, Michi opts for a relaxed approach – no posing allowed!
“I never tell the model or the sitter how to pose – that completely disrupts me,” she says. “Everything is extremely organic.”
The images are then judged by Michi as to what the next process should be.
“They are the art itself. Sometimes the photograph says to me ‘No, you need to leave this as a photograph’. Or actually ‘This is a beautiful photograph, but you’ve missed something’. Maybe it needs to be more monochrome or black and white – that’s where the fine art and the layering comes in.
“The more I look at the portrait, the more I go back to how I got that portrait, the process, how was I feeling? How was the person feeling? A story builds up and that’s then where I’ll use a digital pen that will allow me to write on my artwork key words – sometimes it’s words like ‘angry’ or ‘loneliness’. It’s just keywords, and that’s my emotions.”
Michi also creates layers in the form of other photographs, taking images of walls, floors and fabrics to create unusual textures, allowing her to really experiment in how the images interact.
“I will always add in some culturally black things,” says Michi. “I’m mixed race. My mum’s from Ecuador’s indigenous people and I have West Indian and African heritage. So for me when I’m doing some of the blending, it’s really important that I take colours and textures and references from my cultural heritage.”
