Gallery

A Weekend in Carey Chanquin’s Gurly World

Carey Chanquin is a graphic designer and photographer from Cape Town documenting her daily life in soft focus film photographs and with her iPhone. She recently lent her natural style to the lookbook for 2Bop’s second women’s collection designed by Ulfah Davids and released in December last year.

This time last year she exhibited her first series of documentary photography titled Gurly which was a pastel-hued look at Cape Town through interesting details that Carey notices moving through the city she calls home. “I haven’t travelled to too many places in my life but I know that Cape Town has a beauty of its own and I always try to bring that through in my work,” she says. What does she aim to capture? “Whatever is in the moment, whether its my sister licking an ice cream or a dog running on a field. I enjoy trying to capture the moment. Being able to look at your memories is one of the best feelings in the world.”

Carey shoots with a Minolta x300 which gives her photos a nostalgic feel combined with a certain crispness, “It almost feels as if the image can come to life if you look at it hard enough,” she says, “and that’s what I love about it.”

Carey’s series Curating Coloureds was featured widely last year. For the series she focussed on portraiture of her peers. “I wanted to showcase coloured people in a different light, a positive light especially in the creative field,” she says, “We as coloured people have so much talent and so much to offer so I just wanted Cape Town to recognise it and to show people that they do not have to look very far to find something great. I also tried to keep my peers in their most natural element and for their personality to shine through the images.”

We asked Carey to keep a photo diary to give us a glimpse of life through her lens.

She says:

So I went to the beach with my mom, we had fish and chips. She also asked me to take a photograph of her as I’m “always taking images” in her mind. I also went to Sunday Edition with some of my friends and my boyfriend and tried to capture the ambiance of the day. I stumbled across the ‘need milk’ wall on my way home and the guy in the bakkie. I also took an image right outside of my workplace. It was quite early and I managed to get the guys wheeling their shop towards the parade. I tried to get a little bit of my every day life and expose it to you.