David Hartung’s freelance photography work has taken him all throughout Asia for 25years, and he has called Macau home since 2008
In recent times, a number of international photographers have found themselves drawn to Macau, as the bright lights of the booming casino industry offered some unique opportunities to work and explore their craft. One such photographer is David Hartung, who arrived here in 2007 just as the Cotai Strip was starting to take off.
“I was based in Shanghai in 2006, and I started doing some work for a magazine called Destination PRD. I came to Macau just after Sands opened and The Venetian was about to open, and I was looking around thinking ‘something’s really happening here,’” remembers David. “I officially moved to Macau in 2008 to work full-time on Destination Macau magazine, and I’ve been here ever since.”
“Initially I was really motivated by all of the new stuff that was happening. The old Portuguese influence and all the new elements coming in with the casinos and construction. I love doing industrial photography and construction photography and documentary photography, and Macau had all of that in a very small area.”
In 2011, David even published a book of images entitled ‘Macau: Work in Progress’ documenting the rapid changes that were taking place in the city at that time. However, his time in Macau almost ended soon after he arrived, due to the financial crisis.
“I never thought I was going to be here very long and when the financial crisis hit, I thought I was done. But I started teaching in Zhuhai and then Tasting Kitchen came along, and that became a whole new direction for me. And it’s been a great direction, some of the best times for me photographically. TK has been taking me all around the world. It’s been phenomenal.”
This new direction with Tasting Kitchen (TK) magazine was of course food photography, not a style that he had particularly focused on previously.
“As a freelance photographer, I was doing everything, travel stories, profiles of people, and news… and food was always part of a travel story, but I never really thought I’d be a food photographer. I didn’t really promote myself as a food photographer on my website, but I started embracing it more, and chefs really responded to it, so for me that was the biggest complement.”
David first became interested in photography in high school when a friend invited him to see him develop some film in a dark room.
“I saw him expose a piece of paper, this negative image, and then you see this image just appear, like a flower blooming right in front of yours eyes like magic, and I just thought, this is really, really cool,” he recalls.
Now his interest was peaked, but he didn’t actually have a camera, so he came up with an innovative way to raise the money he needed.
“I was from an agricultural community, so I raised a lamb to take to the county fair, and sold it at an auction. I made enough money to buy a brand new Canon TX, which was the most basic 35mm camera you could get.. 150 dollars!”
He took a summer community college class and was introduced to all sorts of photography, but it was photojournalism that really excited him. Then he travelled throughout Asia in the mid-1980’s, to China, Taiwan and South Korea.
“I saw the camera as being like a magic ticket… this little machine that could take me wherever I wanted to go and possibly make a living out of it. I found out that I really liked taking photos of people, and I liked meeting people. It’s that interaction, I get to meet people and learn about them. I love talking to them and trying to capture something of them, just trying to get some part of them to come out in the picture, and that’s why I love photography so much.”
After returning to California and working for a newspaper for five years, he travelled back to Taiwan in 1995 and really began his career as a freelance photographer, doing jobs for publications like Time, Newsweek, Forbes and Business Week.
Now, after 25 years of successfully working throughout Asia, he is back in his home in the Napa Valley, California, unable to return to Macau due to the Covid-19 situation.
“I can’t do any work. It’s just impossible. Since I’m mainly a food photographer right now, the restaurants are shut down, and even if they open up, they’re not going to spend any money on photography. So at this stage, it’s just a waiting game. As a freelance photographer, sometimes you’re riding high with a lot of work, and sometimes you’re down in these valleys. This is the deepest valley I’ve been in in my entire career.”
David is confident that things will return to some kind of normality eventually, although he sees the commercial photography industry changing in some significant ways.
“Clients are putting a lot more attention on influencers or KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). When it comes to KOL’s and their photography skills, some of them are good, but they’re not great, and everybody wants things done so fast. Anybody who takes photos that require some time to appreciate… no one’s going to pay any attention to it,” he notes.
“One of the great documentary photographers was Walker Evans who was around during the great depression era in the 1930’s and 40’s. His pictures are actually pretty boring, just buildings and signs… those aren’t going to get a lot of likes on Instagram today. A pretty girl in a bikini is going to have more followers than somebody who is shooting some serious photojournalism in Afghanistan. People don’t want to have that serious stuff,” he comments.
Technology has also had a major impact on photography in recent years, and David acknowledges that at times he still works “in an old school way”.
“I’m a little different from younger photographers, because I still use a light meter.”
On the other hand, he has fully embraced the digital era.
“Some photographers say that they like film more than digital. I love digital, and all the things I can do with it. With digital, I feel like I have grown a lot as a photographer. I still do a lot of Black & White in digital, and I have a lot of control over the tonality of that image in the digital darkroom, that would be very difficult to achieve in a traditional Black & White dark room.”
“And I can concentrate on what’s happening with the person in front of me, rather than worrying about what colour gel I should put over the flash, and what colour filter I should put over the lens, all that kind of stuff that interferes with the process.”
