Shooting still lifes, portraits and sculptures in distinctive pastel tones, Jang nevertheless considers herself a fashion photographer, and says she intends to keep working in the industry. “I never consider my work to be unrelated to fashion,” she says. “I like to think that it depends on the eye of the beholder.”

Jang was a finalist at the Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography this year, her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, and she’s had a solo show in New York, but she’s not resting on any laurels, saying she wants to keep challenging herself.

Where her past work was shot on film and captured in natural light, for example, she shot this series of still lifes on a Canon EOS 5D Mk II with a flash, “to learn the benefits of using a digital camera and to engage in a long-term project, since I’ve never been committed to a body of work while I was in school”. The flash helped her achieve a greater degree of flatness to her images, she adds, something central to this as-yet-unnamed series of images. “I mainly focused on the two-dimensional quality of photography,” she explains. “I wanted to portray elegant simplicity by creating a new shape, deliberately losing a chunk of information in the image.”

Jang describes her work as “lighthearted and inquisitive”, adding that curiosity helps drive her projects forward. She was happy to find there is “room to grow” with digital capture and working with flash, and still has more ideas to add to and subtract from this series. “I want to resolve the project,” she says, “[but] I tend to work very slowly. I want to be patient to create refined images.”

Visit www.inaphotography.com.

Image © Ina Jang.

Image © Ina Jang.