Hunter Mathews (she/her) is an analog photographer based in New York City, originally from Los Angeles, and a graduate of New York University. Her practice centers on long-term projects documenting the people closest to her, exploring freedom, intimacy, and adolescence through everyday moments shared together, often on road trips and outdoors. Alongside shooting on film, she hand-prints her photographs in the darkroom.
An alum of the Eddie Adams Workshop and an archivist for Joel Meyerowitz, her work has been exhibited at Brooklyn Film Camera and the Glasgow Gallery of Photography, and featured in Photo Vogue, the International Center of Photography, Gelatin Magazine, and F-Stop Magazine.
Your work feels very observational. Do you usually go into a shoot with something specific in mind, or do you prefer responding to what's happening around you?
I respond to what's happening around me. I don't go into a shoot with something specific planned out, only a general idea. I don't often plan shoots. I simply document what's going on in my own life.
Has photography changed the way you move through the world?
Completely, but it's the only way I know how to move. I can't remember a time when photography felt separate from the rest of my life. Photographing people so closely has made me more compassionate and empathetic because that kind of attention carries over into everything else.
What's one medium outside your own that you keep coming back to for inspiration?
I write sometimes, and I make collage work, so those two always pull me back alongside photography.
What are you curious about right now?
The cannonball scene in America.
Photos courtesy of Hunter Mathews.
