My name is Benjamin von Wong and I’m a conceptual artist. I create content that is simultaneously skills as well as motion. I seek, I teach, I do basically a whole bunch of other different things. At the end of the day, most people know me as a photographer. So it seems to be the easy way to put myself in a box that people can understand what I do. I picked up photography completely by random. I was a mining engineer by trade. And one day, a girl broke up with me while I was working in a mine in Winnemucca, Nevada and I decided that if I didn’t find myself a new hobby, I would go crazy. So, I decided that it would be nice to take picture of the stars and I had no idea what I was doing but I wanted to take pictures of the stars. So I went to Walmart and I bought my first point and shoot. And as most things go, you start small and along the way, things slowly develop, they grow and before I knew it what had initially begun as just a small little hobby turned out into a part time job I would suppose.
I started doing a lot of event photography; I did weddings, I did cocktails, I did concerts, I did anything—anything as long as it was with my camera. I quit my engineering degree and started traveling with photography and that’s basically what’s been going on since then.
When it comes to my projects; the problem with dreaming big and imagining anything you want is that you probably can’t do it. You can’t just do anything you want because realistically there’s a lot of a constraint. It’s been far more effective to start with one piece of the puzzle—something possible for us whether it’s a location, whether it’s the model, whether it’s the costume, some—that one thing that really inspires you that you already have and then build up from there and just start from nothing which is your imagination. And say okay now I want to make it all happen! So I find that you have a far higher success rate if you simply begin with the things that you already have access to.
My favorite projects are not the projects that have the craziest photos but the ones that have made the greatest impacts on people. So I realized a project which was really not even a photo shoot but a video where I volunteered my time and flew myself over into South Carolina to help them make a viral video and raised 2 million dollars for them over the course of a year—less than a year to save a 4 year old daughter is one of my most memorable projects. I surprised one of my fans in Australia by putting myself in a box and showing up at his doorstep and taking him on a one week adventure. You know those are the projects that don’t produce necessarily the best images but they’re the ones that you remember the most.
To be continued...
