Viveca writes:

My fourth lecture follows on from my first three, all of which are chronological – ‘Urban Exploration to Fine Art: A Photographic Journey’, ‘iPhoneography to Fellowship: My Continuing Journey’ and ‘A Photographer’s Perspective: My Life Through a Lens’. Here I will re-visit some derelict locations, some of which are very dark and full of shadows, show a range of iPhone shots, a series entitled ‘Miksang’ (Tibetan for ‘Good Eye’), candids of people in cafés, and sharing how I created some of my multi-layered images using Photoshop.

I began visiting derelict buildings in 2009, and was for a time quite an active member of the ‘UrbEx scene’, during which time I shot hundreds of photographs in various locations. In this talk I’ll be showing some of these previously unseen images, including a section of photos shot indoors in very low light, leading to very deep and dark shadows from which the lighter elements gently emerge.

I wouldn’t be me if there weren’t some photos shot on an iPhone, and there is a small series named ‘Café Life’ capturing candidly some of the customers I have observed over time. There is a collection of images shot in the ‘Miksang’ form of contemplative photography, a method I am very interested in and seem to naturally gravitate towards without even realising that what I was doing was ‘a thing’. It is about placing the mind’s attention without distraction to connect with what one sees deeply and intimately, and to express that with the camera simply and precisely. In the last part of the talk I will explain how I created some of my multi-layered photo composites in Photoshop.

Viveca Koh FRPS FIPF

I am a self-taught Fine Art photographer, with a special fascination for small details, for lost, abandoned, poignant and generally broken objects, and also for darkness contrasting with light, both in a physical and emotional sense.
Many of my illustrative images simply evolve as I am working on them - I start off with a quite straightforward idea of what I want to achieve but am always willing to venture wherever the photograph wants me to go, as I overlay multiple images together or add textures, scanned documents as new layers, and subtle shading. Two photographs may blend together in a way that I could not have previously imagined, and this is one of the things that I find so exciting and all-consuming when I work, to produce a final image that perhaps a little bit different, that invokes emotion in the viewer and makes them question their sense of the world as they know it.

In June 2014 I was awarded a Fellowship Distinction by the Royal Photographic Society, following on from an Associateship Distinction in June 2011 and a Licentiateship Distinction in 2010.

In May 2021 I was awarded Fellowship with the Irish Photographic Federation.