Sirui Ma

0:00 [Applause]

0:06 hello everyone how's it going my name is Sirui and today I'll be giving you a little overview of my work and focusing on my debut book. So photography has always been in my life born to journalist parents photography was always within my reach and it was a means for my parents to share their travels and experiences with me these were some of my earliest photos that I took of my friends having lived quite a transient life moving from Beijing to London back to Beijing then to New York then to London again it became photography also became a way I could see and move through the world in my practice it's always a priority to me to tell and emplify stories that are real and related able even when it's a commercial job I'm still aiming to create images that are people centered and whatever product I'm shooting can become a supplement to the that person's story I take great pleasure in noticing small moments of Beauty in everyday life and sharing that with others through my work in 2017 I moved to London again from new New York City they say absence makes the heart grow fonder I've never felt more like a New Yorker than after I left in fact most of my projects about New York came to life after I stopped living there.

1:43 And this was the case and the reason that sparked sparked my idea for my book Subway portraits and this is the cover of the book as a public school kid and queens the subway was a gateway to the world for me I've always loved public transit and how it keeps a city connected it's a veins of the city and this is a little excerpt from my book. I have long admired the energy and style of Subway conductors there is a sense of Beauty in their Solitude the way they keep the city moving the way they quite literally look after the passengers on the subway their uniforms also intrigued me in the way that each person made the same garments unique by adding their personal touch a pair of goggles a hat pattern gloves or earplugs of a certain color the conductors never look the same as one another. And this is the beauty of for of uniforms to me.

2:42 So I would often ride the Subway by myself and whenever I would disembark the train I would wave to them and they would often smile and wave back in total honesty it took a few years of thinking about this project before I finally plucked up up the courage to go out and shoot the book of this project on June 2nd 2023 I was overthinking the element of talking to strangers for the shoot but when I went out and did it it felt fine and even the rejections I realized weren't personal I also wrote my contact information on pieces of paper and cut it up.

3:19 So that I could hand it to them in case they wanted to receive the pictures at the end the shoot concept is simple photographing Subway conductors on my medium format with a flash mounted in the brief moments they were stopped at whatever station I was standing and waiting at capturing their style and personality I stationed myself at four different stops throughout a period of a day and after shooting in the subway for a full day I ended up with 100 images and printed all the ones I liked from it it felt substantial enough for a series I wanted it to end up as a book.

3:59 But I knew that I wanted this project to become richer than that this was when I pitched the project to my good friend Eli Rose and Bloom for him to design and edit the book with me shout out to Eli who is in New York over the period of about another year Eli and I spent countless hours voice noting zooming emailing meeting the printers to bring the bring the book to life I sought contributions from friends in the form of artwork and writings when I chased up three of the subway conductors who reached out to me to receive their portraits only one of them was responsive and our conversation also ended up in the book it was a different window into the life of a Subway conductor once we had substantial amount of content for the book we decided it was best for me to work with Eli in person for a week to really speed things up. So in May I went to New York for a week and we worked on the design and formatting of the book it was important for me for the book to reflect the analog nature of my practice as well as it containing My Personal Touch in the form of handwriting I print all my work by hand in the dark room and always hang on to test strips for no apparent reason when most people throw them out.

5:15 And this book is the first instance where test strips have been used for anything besides bookmarks it was also for this reason that we spent months working on a section of the book dedicated at to all the pictures I had ever taken on the subway ever since I had a camera phone or when I used an iPod touch as a phone I spent weeks going through different hard drives singling out any images that I had ever taken in the subway system cataloging them chronologically and by device it was important for me to illustrate a sense of life in the book. And in my experience as a Subway Rider over the years at first we attempted a huge grid of of all the photos I compiled which was some somewhere around a thousand images but I felt that they would be stronger if I were able if I were able to connect the different images over time I created 40 different pages of different categories of these phone pictures body language between loved ones performances graphic t-shirts adverts my outfits other people's outfits we received the Unbound dummy of the book A Week Ago and the book Subway portraits will be released towards the end of this month through the experience of working on this book for a total of about 2 and a half years from conception to delivery I really learned the power and importance of choosing the right people to collaborate with to allow yourself to take your time. But also to set yourself deadlines there was so much about publishing that I didn't know before this which intimidated me a lot it felt like a baptism of fire at many points mistakes were made corrected then more discovered you can be precious about it and let the editing take forever.

7:29 But the most important thing is to just dive into it and relinquish control thank you