Interview with Sophie Curtis

When I got an email from Sophie Curtis the other day I was a little surprised. When she explained that she was "quite drunk", I decided it was probably time for an interview.

BOTY: Who are you? Where do you live? How old are you?
SC: i'm sophie curtis, 19 years old, and i live in the south east of england. i spend too much time indoors at the moment.



Tell us a bit about your work.
i only use 35mm point and shoot cameras right now and only seem to be photographing one person, which i am trying to change. i have an obsession with the backs of people's heads. i guess my photos are sort of diaristic, i usually just take photos of things in my day to day life, but recently i've been trying to be more experimental - to make things happen instead of waiting for them to fall into my lap. i always hated the idea of staging things, but i am slowly feeling like i should more and more, because photographing ordinary things is feeling stale.



tools of the trade?
nikon 35ti, yashica t4, olympus mju ii. and the occasional photo on one of my best friend's cameras, often his contax t2.



I read a post you had made on flickr talking about how you like landscape/horizontal photography because that format is the same way as our vision works. Now, while I guess thats sort of true, I'm not sure I want to agree. I've kind of been a bit of a nerd about different formats lately, so I'm just interested to hear your thoughts about that.
i just feel a lot more comfortable taking photos landscape. i take the occasional photo portrait and it just always looks shit and i wish i had taken it horizontally! its probably that i'm not good at it, rather than landscape being better than portrait. and i am completely unskilled in medium format, although i have always wanted to take people's portraits on a huge medium format camera because they always look so neat and central but i don't have the money for a camera like that and it doesn't seem like something i'd want to use all the time.
i'm really into films, i love trawling through stills on the internet, and i think that is another reason why i like my photos to be landscape, like a shot from a film.



What projects are you working on right now that youre excited on?
well my best friend, simon nunn, and i are working on pus-eye together, as you know, and we just did a mini interview for fever zine about it, which was pretty good. the issue isn't out yet, but i'm really looking forward to seeing that in print! and our other blog, outhereoverthere.blogspot.com, with our really good friend alex howard is going nicely, we've only just started it but we're thinking that once we have a certain amount of photos on there we can make a little photo book from it.
me and si also have a little project called "space travel" which i have alot of ideas for. you can see some photos si has already taken for it on his flickr.
oh and simon and i are also supposed to be making a book of photos from one of our groups but we haven't started properly yet so that won't be completed any time soon.



Tell us a bit about the pus-eye blog. It seems to be blowing up in the best way possible, but at the same time, I dont think I've ever read anything about what its about.
haha that's true, we've never really defined it properly i suppose. basically, pus-eye is meant to be a showcase of work from photographers that don't really get the recognition (yet) that we think they deserve. both si and i know that its difficult to stand out in the countless amounts of people who show their photos on the internet, and we just wanted to show people the lesser known photographers that we really like. we usually choose photos that reflect our own styles, so they're often compact camera users that photograph the intimate details of their lives.



You stay pretty active on flickr, youre in a ton of groups, etc. What do you think are some of the pros and cons about flickr for young photographers?
yes, i am a biggg internet user. it kind of annoys me, i should get out and do more, but this winter in particular for various reasons, i have spent alot of time online. i suppose i use flickr alot because all magazines and websites that have ever contacted me have found me through flickr, so i haven't felt the need to move away from it, and instead have become more immersed in it. i think for other young photographers the pros are that you CAN get recognition for your photos, but the cons are that there are so many people on there, that its hard not to get swallows into the masses of macro flowers and weird holga photos. i guess thats why i use groups alot, because if you choose the right group, theres definately the possibility of standing out. and you can find like-minded people, who run webzines and things, so thats handy!



What do you have up coming? Any shows or zines coming out or anything like that?
i'm thinking more and more that i might make some small cheap photo books, through a self-publishing site, but i really don't know if anyone would buy them to be honest, so i'm not sure if its worth it? someone contacted me recently about showing my photos in a exhibition in argentina, so i think thats happening, but i'm not even going to get to see it! apart from those and a few other small things nothing huge is happening, just taking more photos until something does.



Ever almost die?
never. once i took too many painkillers for stomach pains and woke the next day unable to move, all my muscles were locked up. it was weird, but nowhere near death haha.



Name drop list?
people: simon nunn, alex howard, dario utreras
blogs: pus-eye.blogspot.com, outhereoverthere.blogspot.com

thanks sophie!
you can check out more of ms. curtis' work on her flickr, or on any of those links i added into the interview.

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