We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Viki Stark a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Viki, thank you so much for joining us. You are such a positive person and it’s something we really admire and so we wanted to start by asking you where you think your optimism comes from?
Optimism for me is a method to keep going each day. It takes work but I actively choose to appreciate that every single day is a gift- of course sometimes things get to ya, and there’s nothing wrong with a beautiful wallow every once in awhile. I think that is where art comes in for me. I can choose to take the monotony, pain, heaviness of a day and channel it into something I can see.
If I have a bad day I can print off a picture and glue gem stones to it and sew around the border in bright red thread. Or crumple it, light it on fire, and let it steep in 2 day old coffee. Art is a great conduit for expressing what might be hard to express otherwise. Its transforming something intangible into something physical and new- and there’s nothing more optimistic than that for me!
next time you’re feeling rough, try drawing something with crayons, really grind into that paper and let it all out-immediate mood boost!
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I really struggle a lot with imposter syndrome so I’m always trying to sort of push through that by trying new experiments with photos I take, both in camera and after processing. Something I have always been interested in is hand coloring photos, so lately I’ve been adding color to film negatives with highlighters and then scanning them in, or printing out black and white photos I’ve taken and painting them with watercolors. There is something so special about taking a digital image and bringing it into the physical world to transform it into something new.
I really just like to have fun, get my hands messy, and create with other people and have been so lucky to work with so many awesome people who like to get weird with me haha!
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
whew that’s a tough one! I really think my toxic positivity did me a solid to keep me going haha! Sort of a blind faith that if I just keep choosing to have fun and make art at some point maybe something will come of it. Not even sure exactly what that something could be but I’d say right now even just being able to keep making art with people has been such an amazing surprise that I am so grateful for. I literally could not do what I want to do without the incredible people who have created with me!
I’d say another area of knowledge/ quality would come from my childhood- my mother was a single parent who worked incredibly hard with little to no support. I remember telling her when I was about 10 or so that I wanted to be a photographer when I grew up and she told me that I absolutely should be a photographer and I should also have a job to fall back on if I needed to. My next birthday she got me my first digital camera.
I always really appreciated the honesty and genuine support of that advice she gave me and have followed it to this day. I have a day job and I make art whenever I can the rest of the time. Not putting all the pressure on my photography to pay my bills really helps me to personally enjoy it more at this point in time. So I suppose my advice is to say you’re still an artist even if you don’t do it full time. Everyone is an artist in their way and there is no one “right” way to do it.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
I am always looking for people to create with! I post model calls on my Instagram (@vstarkphotos) for specific ideas I would like to try, but I also love working with people to help create their vision for a photo session. Its all about empowering people to lean into their creativity and just being a safe space for that to be expressed, not to mention super freaking fun!
I am also currently doing a little project where I invite people to anonymously submit stories of a crush they have had, or have currently. If you would like to join all the information is on this website: https://vstarkphotos.wixsite.com/the-crush-chronicles
Contact Info:
- Website: https://vstarkphotos.wixsite.com/letsgetcreative
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vstarkphotos/
