The Same Circle, a Different Eye

A few weeks back I fell into the work of Chih Hsien Chen, a photographer from Taiwan documenting the young, slightly electric social world around him. Then I followed the thread and found Bravo Ko—same country, same city, same circle of friends, as it turns out. There’s something almost improbable about that: two photographers of genuine quality operating in the same orbit, apparently without competing, both pointing cameras at the same generation from slightly different angles.

Ko’s photographs have a directness I keep returning to. She isn’t aestheticizing her subjects or flattening them into some generic portrait of youth. The people in her frames look specific—like themselves, not like a concept of themselves. That specificity is harder to achieve than it looks. It requires actual trust between photographer and subject, and a willingness to let a moment be exactly what it is rather than what it could be with better light or a different composition.

I’ve been publishing work like this on this journal for years, and every time there’s someone ready to dismiss it. Not real art. Just a hipster with a camera getting called the next Ryan McGinley. Boring, predictable, interchangeable. I never know what to do with that criticism except to disagree and keep going. These images—from Taiwan, from Berlin, from New York, from wherever young people are making cultures that belong to them—seem genuinely valuable to me. Not because they’re technically virtuosic or conceptually bold, but because they’re true. They show who people actually were at a specific moment, which is the only thing photographs are really for.

Ko and Chen share a friend group and apparently a sensibility too, though they work differently enough that you wouldn’t confuse them. That kind of creative proximity—where closeness breeds not imitation but something more like parallel development—is rare enough to be worth paying attention to.