Simple Use Snapshots with Lauren Lepore

Photographer Lauren Lepore, who we previously interviewed for our LomoWomen series, is back and is here to prove that the gear doesn't make the photographer. Documenting her life on film with our Simple Use Camera, Lepore aims to show that a creative vision is the most important aspect of creating great photographs.

Hi Lauren! We spoke to you before in our LomoWomen series. What have you been up to since then?

Since the LomoWomen series last year, I've been shooting! It never stops. I spent a decent amount of time traveling some more of the country collecting pictures. I'm working on personal collections that I eventually hope to share with the public. I’m about to show one in LA this week with my friend Zhamak that you guys have also interviewed before.

How did you get into photography and how has your passion for it evolved since then?

To be completely honest with you, I got into photography because of the artistic women in my life. I owe a lot of respect to my mom who is an amazing artist and to my middle school art teacher, who was the first person to call me an artist. I ended up having a pretty good eye for photography. I blame it on having to wear glasses my whole life — I’ve been seeing out of a lens pretty much since birth. I really enjoyed being able to show others exactly how I see the world. I often fiddled around with the focus on my cameras when I was younger to be able to take a picture in focus to my eye without glasses on. As I grew older, photography grew with me and became a way for me to express myself. It was still a way for me to show the world what I saw, but it also became about places that some may consider not the regular walks of life. The freedom that adulthood brought didn’t just change me. It incredibly changed my photography. Where there was an innocence in my younger photos, it has now been replaced with photos that carry the weight of the moments captured in them. Photography ended up becoming my life and on a day to day basis, I'm capturing my life around me.

You shot this series with a Lomography Simple Use Camera. Can you offer any tips for shooting with this setup?

Shoot your photo and then gently rewind the camera just a bit to shoot another photo on the same frame. Use flash to get a good contrast between the frames and you’ll have an awesome double exposure. If you wanna get a little bit funky, try a different colored swatch over the flash for each photo. Because this camera is so simply built, its amazing when it comes to being able to control the outcome of your film!

Tell us more about the process of creating this work and your aim for this project.

The body of work I shot with this camera came through a lot of trial and error. I shot this through a long period of time, gaining a relationship with this camera and learning how it works and how best I can make it work for me. I took it around with me as a second shooter, testing it here and there in different scenarios with different colors over the flash to test its capabilities. Once I got the feel for it, I knew that this camera could represent almost a dream-like reality. I began to use it in scenarios where I knew either the color of the flash or the grittiness of the camera with no flash would create a magical recreation of the moments captured.

What have you learned from this series?

This series taught me that sometimes you have to trust in your camera more than you trust in yourself. By not knowing how the variation in colors over the flash would hinder the photos, I constantly found myself taking a leap of faith in the camera. It never let me down.

If you would like to check out more of Lauren's work, head over to her website and follow her on Instagram.

written by sragomo on 2019-02-19