A Year of Wandering in Unique Light, on Medium Format Film

Author
  • Brendan George Ko
Photographer
  • Brendan George Ko

Camera
  • Mamiya 6, Mamiya 7, Mamiya RZ67
Film

Hyper realistic plant portraits, surreal landscapes, and intimate encounters draw a visual line through time and place


Published: 02-18-2020

Updated: 05-23-2024

About the author

Guest Contributor
Guest Contributor
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Brendan George Ko is an interdisciplinary artist living between Maui, Hawai’i and Toronto, Canada and working primarily in photography, video, sound, installation, and oral tradition

My mother was the family documentarian. My sisters and I would wait with the sun blaring into our eyes while she took her time getting all the settings right on her Nikon FM. There were trips to the Florida Keys and to the Petrified Forest. Countless visits to the Grand Canyon, the Very Large Array observatory in southern New Mexico, and San Diego. And up the California 1.

After a year, or even just a long road trip, she would disappear into her office to work on her typewriter, sometimes venting frustrations when she had to wite-out a typo. As a child I was too busy running around wild to see the true value in what she was creating—her scrapbooks. Years later as an adult I would revisit those numerous scrapbooks she made, and like a flash my childhood would come back to me, with all of its minute detail, the warmth and that wander.

Those scrapbooks are the closest thing I have to a time machine, and with my own scrapbook project (now six years strong) I want to carry on the family tradition. With each year I make a new scrapbook representing the encounters I have with both humans and regions of land. Here’s my visual poem for the year past.

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Locations may include: Duncan's Cove, Georgian Bay, The Great Slave Lake, Hale'iwa, Joshua Tree, Lake Rosseau, Lake Welch, Leslie Spit, Los Angeles, Mai Poina, Mākena, Oak Island, Pāhoa, Polipoli, Pukalani, Pu'unēnē, Port Renfrew, Pupukea, Toronto Island, Vancouver, Victoria, Waihe'e, Wailuku, Wander Valley

Now check out Brendan George Ko's 2018 Scrapbook, similarly made on medium format film