14-Year-Old Photographer's Amazingly Surreal Self Portraits

[carguy]

We're always big fans of up-and-coming teen photographers here on My Modern Met, but 14-year-old photographer Zev (aka fiddle oak) has got to be one of the youngest talents we've ever come across. The Natick, Massachusetts-based teen photographer's portfolio exhibits skills beyond his years.

Zev manages to present a variety of techniques in his collection of images that lean towards the surreal in his self-portraits, which also overlap with his ongoing Little Folk series. A common theme in these works is to play with size ratio. By shrinking himself down for his imaginative photos, Zev takes the viewer along on a magical journey of rediscovering the world around us where blades of grass stand at equal height, a leaf can be used as an umbrella, and an acorn makes a suitable seat. His self-portraits also show just how young he is, making it all the more astounding that he's capable of producing such quality pictures.


Gaining attention for his creative images matched by his youthful age, the adolescent photographer has already had the opportunity to collaborate with one of today's masters of surreal photography, Joel Robinson. Zev has proven to be one photographer to keep an eye on.

Take a look at some of his work:
14-Year-Old Photographer's Amazingly Surreal Self Portraits - My Modern Metropolis

He's also on flickr: Flickr: fiddle oak's Photostream

 

[Horoscope Fish]

Interesting.

That being said, why do I have the nagging feeling there's a helping hand involved with those photos? For whatever it says about me, as a person, those photo's, and the subsequent manipulation required, require, I think it's safe to say, a certain... level of sophistication... to pull off as successfully as shown there. And I mean on both a creative AND technical level that make me suspicious. Maybe I'm totally in the wrong here and maybe the kid's a prodigy... But I'm thinking there's more to the story than what we're seeing.

Or maybe I'm just a crappy amateur with jealousy issues.

 

[co2jae]

Interesting photos no matter how they were created. Made me think if you took a brain melder and put Rod Serling, JR Tolkien and your favorite photographer in there, this is what you'd get.

 

[ohkphoto]

... to pull off as successfully as shown there. And I mean on both a creative AND technical level that make me suspicious. Maybe I'm totally in the wrong here and maybe the kid's a prodigy... But I'm thinking there's more to the story than what we're seeing.

I agree. Not to take anything away from his accomplishments, but having worked with high school kids for 25+ years (including this past year), I would have to conclude that he would have to be a prodigy and most likely does NOT attend a public school in the US . . . I'm guessing a highly supportive parent.

​In any case, good for him. At least he's being creative and not up to mischief.

 

[crycocyon]

You can see part of the process he goes through to make a photograph here and it seems a lot of it involves travel photography with his family.

fiddleoak

It actually wouldn't be that difficult to blend parts of different photos with each other in Photoshop. But clearly he would have been trained at some point to be able to do that. Certainly there is some very imaginative creativity going on there.

Also given that he lives only 22 miles away from me, I can vouch for the huge photographic and artistic community in the Boston area as well as there being a lot of technically and artistically advanced resources to draw from in the area.

 

[WhiteLight]

Whoever did it, the work is absolutely brilliant

 

[§am]

I agree, the images presented are quite outstanding, and no doubt took hours, days or even weeks of work to create.

However, are they really photographs, or more images created from photographs??
IMHO photographs which have some PP done can still be classed as a photo, but where you take multiple photos to create a new picture is just an image.