The Art in Doing: On Photography with Matt Holloway
Updated: Sep 22
Photography is everywhere. It used to mean extensive training, big lights, and expensive equipment on the set of Vogue. It used to mean shooting mind-blowing landscapes in the Himalayas and capturing huge birds mid-flight for National Geographic. Now? All you need is a phone, and you can take and process thousands of photos in less than a whole second.
Access to photography has become so widely accepted, it’s hard to picture life without it. Especially with social media making it so easy to edit and share photos with literally the whole world for free. Somewhere between then and now, photography as a concept changed. This shift brings with it a question.
In a world full of people with cameras, what makes someone a photographer?
I spoke with photojournalist Matt Holloway to find out.
Meet Matt
Matt has won a number of awards, had his work displayed in fancy galleries, and gained attention for his deeply human photography. The Devon-based creative specialises in film photography, with a major focus on black and white pieces. He feels that sticking to mainly just one style helps him shift the focus away from how to capture a shot, and direct more attention to why that particular shot.
As an aspiring humanitarian photojournalist, Matt’s photography explores humans in all capacities of how you view that word. He uses his camera to give people without one the opportunity to be seen by a world obsessed with them. Matt uses his craft to draw attention to political outrage, hopelessness, and the subjects viewed as ‘too controversial’ by other photographers.
From collaborating with a number of social campaigns and charities, his work often features emotional and sometimes distressing subjects. His approach is always sensitive and ethical, acknowledging the hardship he documents with respect and compassion.
In April this year, Matt released his eagerly awaited project, Letters to God- a photography book exploring the difficult relationships many have with religion and its influence on their lives. The project is a powerful collaboration, pairing his documentary photography with written contributions submitted by the public.
Following his first public project, Floor, a personal poetry and photography collection, his second book credits his uniquely personal use of photography as a tool to articulate other people’s relationships with the world as they experience it.
A chat with Matt
As luck would have it, Matt is actually a friend of mine, and with minimal convincing, he let me interview him about his work as a photographer. Here are the best bits of our chat:
Almost all your shots are in black and white; what’s the idea behind that?
“I have a big belief in letting the story take format; if you restrict yourself to one style, you can find that story and share it.
I think stories are best told black and white. The intimacy between light and dark tells you something you can’t get from colour.”
How physical do you find doing a shoot? Do you get involved a lot?
“Yeah, [laughs] I do. There’s some weird positions I’ve been in to get the right angle.
You use your body a lot. It’s your greatest tool. If you’re in a weird position and you’re not thinking about it, you’re doing it right.
I’m pretty tall, so I have to do this weird [laughs again], sort of squat to be eye level with people. So yeah, physical is the right word.”
How important is the background work behind a shoot?
“I think that it depends. Personally for me, I can touch on some quite blurry ground. If you go into a shoot with just a camera, it can be quite [pauses] insensitive.
It’s so important to research and understand the background. It’s more ethical that way. I often meet people 2-3 times before even taking a camera. It’s all about trust.”
What advice would you give aspiring photographers?
“A lot of people can think about it too much; I think there’s an art in just doing.
Film [photography] is hard. Get yourself a digital camera, set it to a manual mode and give it a go. It’s all about trial and error. You have to do it to get better at it. “
The Hollo-way
So, what makes someone a photographer?
I think based on my interview with Matt, what it means to be a photographer is ultimately a personal affair- it depends on what photography means to you. Taking a photo and being a photographer are two separate things, and it all comes down to why you’re doing it. In Matt’s case, being a photographer means being a conduit between different perspectives and lives.
After our chat, I asked Matt for a final word to leave the readers with, and he did not disappoint. Professional photographer, and apparently trainee philosopher too, this is Matt’s final picture.
“Photography is a powerful representation of life. If you’re unclear about parts of your own life and want to be heard, photography can listen.”
All photography displayed is credited to Matthew Holloway. You can find his work online at https://www.matthollophoto.com/about.
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