After dabbling in fine art photography, portraiture, editorial work and film stills, Max Chan is now ready to build a career as a fashion photographer.By the age of 27,
Max Chan has already amassed a wealth of experience as a photographer. Having first picked up the camera for his visual arts homework in high school, he started working as a photographer’s assistant while an undergraduate student of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong, and later became a photographer for Tao Magazine. In 2017, he received a scholarship from the Education Bureau to pursue a master’s degree in fashion photography at the London College of Fashion, which he will finish by the end of 2018.
Chan’s personal works have always leaned towards fine art photography, including “Unfolded” which received the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards 2012 from the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Having lived in old districts such as Sham Shui Po as a child, Chan is fascinated by those large buildings with a central courtyard in public housing estates and it was this that inspired the award-winning work.
“These old buildings are like animals such as tigers and bears. People hunt them down to get their furs, which are then stretched out as displays. I tried to apply this idea to those buildings so that more people could notice them,” says Chan.
“There are four facades to the building, like a box, so I had to take a photo from each of the 28 floors and then put them together in post-production. One of the main challenges was to take all photos within a two-hour window so the light didn’t vary too much,” he recalls.
As Chan toured the building to take pictures, he observed people going about their daily activities, and how individual homes looked different. “Unfolded” was about what the photographer considered beautiful architecture, and also a record of a place he called home.
