Photographer Jeff Hahn's impressive CV belies his youth. At 21, Hahn sometimes finds it hard to be taken seriously as a photographer, especially in a city such as London, which is teeming with talent. Recently, when turning in a shoot of a chief executive for a magazine, the managing editor mistook him for the delivery boy. But Hahn's work has appeared in leading luxury and lifestyle magazines in Asia, including The Peninsula magazine, Maison Mode, Kee, Esquire and WestEast, and he's been hired for corporate photoshoots.
In the past two years he's been published in Britain and had an exhibition on London's fashionable Brick Lane. He's being profiled by cult magazines Idol and i-D, and is preparing for upcoming exhibitions in New York, London and Hong Kong.
'I got into photography when I was about 13,' he says. 'My brother had one of those amazing and, in retrospect, awful, two-megapixel chunky digital cameras and I used to play around with it. Shortly after that I discovered Lomography which, aside from being a company with ingenious ideas for new cameras, was also more of a concept and a way of photographing. It's all about capturing the moment and not thinking technically.'
Hahn's signature look - his eye for finding the aesthetic in the mundane, often saturating images with a 1970s-style hue - was formed as much by default as by deliberation.
'I explored light leaks, blurry pictures and photographing the banal,' he says. 'It was probably the most liberating entry into such a massive world. I think when I took my first picture, my eyes opened for the first time and, instead of looking, I was finally seeing.'
Born in Switzerland to a Swiss father and Chinese mother, Hahn was raised in Taiwan, New Zealand and Hong Kong, but he now lives and works in London. As much as he likes the challenges of working in the British capital, he still has a taste for Hong Kong.
Hahn started his career interning at magazines on the well-beaten paths of Sheung Wan. He was 16 and didn't get paid, but was glad for the opportunity.
