Claudia Albisser Hund
1. Can you introduce yourself and talk about how you got into photography?
After graduating from high school with a Matura in modern languages, I wanted to do something artistic and creative. After 4 years of studying photography, I started my own studio and while I specialised in food and still life photography, in my free artistic work I looked for my subjects in landscapes and nature.
2. Where did you study photography?
I studied photography at the School of Applied Arts in Basel, Switzerland
3. Do you remember your first shot? What was it?
My first real photo was in the zoological garden where I accidentally observed the birth of a gnu and took a photo of it. I was about 8 years old.
4. What equipment do you use?
I work with Fuji x-T3 cameras and natural light, in the studio with LED and flash light.
5. What do you hope to achieve?
I want to touch people with simple, unspectacular pictures and trigger emotions.
6. What compliment inspired/touched you the most?
When someone stands quietly and for a longer time in front of my photos and is absorbed.
7. What inspires your unique storytelling?
I’m a dreamer and an observer, I’m inspired when there is nothing else in my head and I can spontaneously discover and realise my image. That’s usually when I’m alone in the nature.
8. What THREE (3) words describe your photography style?
Unspectacular, dreamy, and touching.
9. Congratulations! As the winner of the European Photography Awards, what does it mean for you and your team to receive this distinction?
Thank you! It is a great honour and satisfaction that I have succeeded in touching others with my photos.
10. Can you explain a bit about the winning work you entered into the 2024 European Photography Awards, and why you chose to enter this project?
At the moment I am working on an exhibition project "the forest" and I regularly go into the forest at different times of the day and in different seasons. I don’t look for specific things, I let nature affect me, I dream, and my gaze searches for its subject, nothing exciting. It is usually a play of colours, textures, shapes, and light, as in this winning picture "in the fairy wood:" It is a photo that describes me very well.
11. How has winning an award developed your career?
People are starting to take an interest in my work. I’m getting requests for newspaper articles, requests for exhibitions and even a short sequence for television has been filmed.
12. Name 1-3 photographers who have inspired you.
Aron Jones with his light painting technique, Ansel Adams with his wonderfully perfect observations of nature in black and white, and among the modern photographers I really like David Baker with his forest scenes.
13. What was the best piece of advice you were given starting out, by a mentor or your role model?
Observe, observe, and observe. You don’t need a camera yet. Once the image is in your head, you just need to push the trigger.
14. What advice would you give someone who would like to become a photographer today?
Let your creativity run free, leave tendencies on the side, and work from intuition.
15. What is your key to success? Any parting words of wisdom?
Oh, if I only knew! I just stay true to myself, maybe that’s it!
16. How do you stay in that space of being receptive to new information and knowledge?
I visit many exhibitions, I’m interested in painting and I like to paint myself too, I look left and right and I’m always curious when I discover something new.
17. Anything else you would like to add to the interview?
Thank you very much for this platform, which makes it possible to present my work to an international audience.
