Tiffany Schoepp became a photographer by doing coincidental groundwork before actually picking up a camera. “I was studying drawing and painting while working in a black and white dark room as a printer for a portrait photographer before I ever learned how to shoot,” she tells us. Midway into her drawing studies, she delved deep into painting, becoming influenced by Nathan Oliveira, Elmer Bischoff and David Park. It was during this time she picked up a camera with the intention of using it as a tool to create images to paint from and discovered the immediacy the camera gave her. Her love of photography was born. And her love of art and painting is evident in her work, as they are clear inspirations for the way she shoots and records moments.

“They endlessly fascinate me,” she tells us when we ask what she enjoys about photographing people. “I have always been in tune with people’s emotions and body language and after fifteen years of being a professional photographer, the camera has become an extension of my body for recording these observations. To be a good photographer you have to expend huge amounts of energy opening yourself up to what people are experiencing and capture these moments as they are happening. When I put myself in this emotionally–visually reactive state, I find myself framing and composing images whose narratives I can only comprehend when I take them home and study them as still photographs. It’s a very personal process for which I am committed to”.