Je Ne Sais Quoi

“Elegance is timeless. It withstands trend; it withstands the commercialization of what fashion and style have become.” – Zac Posen

My initial aspiration in art was to become a graphic designer before I took interest in photography years ago. I took a typography class at my local art college. The lessons learned from that class made a significant influence in my taste for aesthetics. I remember with our first lesson, we were told to write down some keywords that describe our taste in design, or what aesthetics we hoped to bring to our work. One of the phrases that stuck with me from that exercise was “quiet elegance”. To this date, I still carry this idea of making elegant work that transcends time.

It is easy to spot the signs of our era. Smartphones, fashion trends, cars, logos, etc. There are also trends within photography that come and go. Remember the images with people wearing bright colored clothing standing in front of epic landscapes, or those way overdone HDR images. Since digital technology came onto the scene, we have been able to take an image, immediately transfer it to any editing software and go crazy with our edits. While it makes life easy and interesting to have access to such a wide array of tools, it becomes easy to overdo it, and it also risks falling into traps of trending edits that dated our photos.

When it comes to both photographing in the field and doing postproduction afterwards, I like to use the French phrase “je ne sais quoi” as a guidance for my approach. “Je ne sais quoi” is often used as a term of praise for someone’s attractiveness, style, or charisma. It’s a French expression that literally means “I don’t know what.” It is used to describe those intangible qualities that make someone special or unique. In the context of compliments, je ne sais quoi refers to an elegant and effortless quality that is difficult to define. When used to describe a woman, je ne sais quoi conveys both admiration and respect. To me, that elusive, timeless quality is also applicable to any art forms, and it is very much something I hope to achieve with my photography. I pay particular attention to eliminate elements, be it in the field, or in the digital darkroom, that will date my images. I aspire to make images that may not give any immediate wow effect, but they leave viewers such "after taste", they cannot help but come back and look again.

My attempt to convey elegance in a photo means to add emotion, pay attention to the gesture of the subjects, and induce mood through different lighting. It also means embedding my personality and my cultural background – Asian aesthetics into the photos I make and being able to select the photos which best represent my artistic vision. Our identity as an artist is seen through the work we produce and share. Be aware of the small details; the kind of things that we don’t notice because they are commonplace to us in our daily life, such as logos, brands, cars, and very time-specific clothes and fashion. Our attention to those minute details can make a big difference to crafting timeless images. My goal is to make an image that in ten, twenty years’ time, one cannot pinpoint when it was made, yet it still carries the same intrigue.