Kiliii Yuyan: interview for IQads.ro

Everyone takes pictures now. We see them everywhere we look in Social Media and we gradually become immune to the emotion they can provide. The images on social media platforms show us the world as we already know it, as we want to see it. But the role of photographers, believes Kiliii Yuyan, is to show people something they have never seen before. To challenge them to understand things differently through emotion.

Kiliii Yuyan searches for human insight through different cultural perspectives. On assignment, he has survived a stalking polar bear, escaped pounding waves diving with sea otters, and found kinship at the edges of the world. Kiliii makes photographic stories for the pages of National Geographic Magazine, TIME and other major publications.

We talked with Kiliii about emotions, images and what he discovered about people through photography.

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Favourite Themes

This notion of cultural googles is one of my favorite ways to explain my work – which is to help people see how different human cultures are, so that we understand that there are so many different ways to live, and that many of those have the solutions to the great human problems.

My other favorite theme is the interrelationship between people and the land and sea. I think in much of the industrial world there is a sense that humans are inherently destructive, that we are incompatible with the natural world. But what I find is that while a few dominating cultures may express that, all the rest believe that humans are not only inseparable from the land, but are its custodians.

Storytelling Techniques

An image is worth a thousand words in the sense that it delivers a tremendous amount of information about a particular place and moment in time. That’s the power of photography. But words can shape higher concepts, and film can bring us through time. Storytelling make use of any number of mediums. At its core, good storytelling transcends those mediums to give us an experience like none other- one where we laugh, cry and learn something.

Honestly, the primary techniques of modern storytelling combine the delivery of knowledge and wisdom through emotion. We want to move people, be it through a film or a poem or a presentation, and we want them to be changed. We want them to understand the world differently at a conceptual level, but to feel at the most fundamental human level.

An Image-Obsessed World

It makes me sad that photography, once a potent tool of storytelling, has been neutered by the sheer number of images floating around in our world. There is incredibly powerful story delivered through the medium, but most of it is now lost in a sea of largely meaningless imagery, at least in the public space. However, I do think that the combination of photography with words (photoessay), or multiple photos (photo series or film), or photography with public speaking (talks) reinvigorates the medium and helps us to deliver stories that still move and transform the world.

Most of the public online photography space, especially in social media, is like a drug that drips slowly. It caters to what people already know about the world, and shows them what they want to see. But as storytellers, if we ignore that application of photography, we can find the ways that photos can challenge people and ask society to grow wiser.