Capturing the soul: portrait photographer Melanie Tjoeng
The Hawai'i-based portrait photographer fuses fine art and documentary photography to capture the innate essence of her subjects.
Raised between Australia and Papua New Guinea, Melanie Tjoeng is a portrait photographer whose work creates an intimate dialogue between her subjects and the viewer. Having studied both anthropology and history, Tjoeng developed a lifelong fascination with the human face, calling it a ‘window to another world’. An introduction to documentary photography at a Perpignan Film Festival in 2009 allowed Tjoeng to envision a career capturing the many faces of humanity. ‘Portrait photography is a silent conversation between myself and my subject. It’s an intimate connection whereby words are not needed to convey a message, or an idea, or a thought. Portrait photography is a form of silent communication and it can be very raw; there is quite literally nowhere to hide in front of the lens. In today’s overexposed times, I find that very refreshing.’
Tjoeng shoots across the globe, but recently has focused largely on the Mediterranean, where she uses the region’s diffused natural light to give an ageless, filmic quality to her portraits. In Ibiza, Tjoeng visited the much-photographed San Juan home of model Vanessa Breuer, whose barefoot and bohemian family life on a mountainside has become the subject of multiple advertising campaigns. Tjoeng captured Breuer barefaced and unstyled in a series of intimate moments with her daughters. It is in a portfolio such as this that we see Tjoeng’s ability to look beyond beauty and capture the raw personality behind the frame. Indeed, it is testament to this ability that Tjoeng was heralded by TIME Magazine as one of the top 50 photographers to watch in the USA and nominated for Photographer of the Year in Hawai’i, her adopted island.
A brief glance through her remarkable body of work suggests that Tjoeng is absorbed by humanity in all its guises – while many portrait photographers prefer to shoot models, Tjoeng’s portfolio reveals people from all walks of life, in all shapes and sizes. ‘I look at my work as art, ‘ muses Tjoeng. ‘It is not my aim to make people look perfect. I’m trying to distil the essence of what makes them human, what makes them unique, and that is a far more complex subject than beauty. I’m trying to capture their soul.’
