Frames of Humanity

We have travelled with Callie Eh to the city of giant waves and seven-skirted women - Nazaré, Portugal.

Behind in Zurich (Switzerland) she has left her little “Panda", a black and white little dog who always looks sad when realizing she's leaving, climbing into her suitcase as if to say "Take me with you."

Contrary to her native Asian culture, she is a natural hugger and an avid collector of feelings and emotions which she captures in the form of photographs.

Her loving heart led her to trade Malaysia for the world over a decade ago. Having lived on several continents and in different countries since then, it was in Poland that she discovered her talent for photography. In those days, everything around her seemed to exude art, from museums to small galleries, from cafes to tattoo parlors. She was captivated by the atmosphere and especially surprised when approached by the owner of a cafe to hold what would become her first solo exhibition.

This moment proved decisive in her engagement to the world of photography, leading her to enroll in her first documentary photography workshop, honing her craft: "I didn't know anything about the technique. It was very difficult and I cried every day when I got home. By the end of the workshop I learned how to select images to organize and tell a story."

At the time, it all seemed so difficult that Callie had considered giving up. As after the storm, there always comes calm, she went on a trip to Mongolia which rekindled her passion for this art, and inspired by the "beautiful subjects" she encountered. She couldn't stop the need to photograph any longer: "I was evolving with photography again. The Leica Q really helped me understand the technique and work on getting closer to the subjects.”

Since then, searching for the photography niche in which she could feel most fulfilled, she has participated in various workshops - weddings, studio, street - but they all led her back to her starting point which was documentary. "These workshops are very important; they help you evolve. When I did the studio photography workshop, almost all the participants knew how to mentor a model, and I kept saying “Act natural’… You always learn a lot by watching how the mentors photograph, and you also learn how they teach."

Nowadays, she finds herself in the role of mentor, and although she feels it is challenging, it's something she truly enjoys. "Everything is a learning process" she says, ”before the contract with Xiaomi I wouldn't take photos with my phone. But I was surprised by the image quality and realized it's much more practical for capturing spontaneous moments." 

Despite Callie's jovial and genuinely friendly demeanor - which prompts her to take selfies with everyone she crosses paths with along the way, even without speaking Portuguese - as we walk through the streets we realize that not all locals want to be photographed. Further on, the reason becomes clear when we spot a large group of tourists with cellphones in hand, observing a dried fish vendor. This scenario takes her back to her trip to Mongolia: "Before photographing the people, the guide told me: these are not models, they are real people, we must respect them. Nowadays, with the widespread use of cell phones and social media, people are more concerned with capturing firsthand events - often misfortunes like people fighting or falling - than with helping. “We must be moral in our photographs", she says.

Touched still by the situation she witnessed, she recalls another trip to Istanbul in which a seagull entangled in a clothesline was spotted at the rooftop of a building. In this bizarre episode, all rescue attempts were unsuccessful while some kept recording the event. Fortunately, in the end, the seagull managed to free itself, but that day Callie was unable to photograph any more, telling us of the respect she has for the difficult work of photojournalists.

We stop for a moment so she can photograph the fish drying on the racks with her cell phone, when she confesses that she didn't bring her camera: "This is a vacation trip. When I'm carrying my camera, I'm much more absorbed, and my eyes are always searching for the next photographic subject. There's no rest. Even so, I'm talking to you and I find myself watching photos passing us by."

Callie has always been a free spirit. She is very independent and has traveled extensively, perhaps as a result of the loss of her mother at sixteen: "Where I come from, there were no hugs or 'I love you’s'. I had to work to buy my first contact lenses." That's also why, at seventeen she moved to Singapore, where she began serving tables at a restaurant: "I went with my sister and a friend of my sister's. I was the only one who could stand to stay there working because I really enjoyed communicating with people.". This spirit of communication guided her work in sales in Malaysia years later and it continues to motivate her to take photographs today as a way of connecting with others.

Love always drew her toward something new; out of love, she can give everything. Even during her darkest moments, her positive mind helped her navigate those tough times, and she remains optimistic and keeps her heart open.

Today she feels grateful even to those who hurt her, believing that everything happens for a reason. "In Chinese, we have an expression that goes: be grateful to those who have hurt you, because they make you grow and become stronger", she says, recalling some of those who have crossed her path.

As we talk, her positive outlook is as evident and clear as her open smile - a trait she says she inherited from her father and Asian culture - which is visually translated in the colorful palette she uses in her images. These days, after several years living in Europe, she feels increasingly inspired by photography classics and occasionally ends up "turning it to black and white.”

Accustomed to studying different cultures, to respect the people of each country she visits, amidst local legal requirements and cultural differences, she confides that in Europe she feels "like a thief taking pictures." She also recalls when she adopted the name Callie, after a fortune teller explained that a name beginning with the letter C would bring her good luck. 

Callie’s engagement to photography has changed the way she chooses her travel destinations. She emotionally recalls a trip to Bangladesh, showing us a photograph of a mother and son walking over a pile of plastic waste: "It's very difficult there. These people's lives are very difficult. They don't have time for depression because they're worried about surviving.  On a big screen, you can see a drop of sweat running down the mother's face, it's very emotional." She explains that although photographing these moments is intense, when she edits them, she tends to feel moved and to appreciate even more everything she has even more.

A lover of good food (especially food to share) and animated films, she considers herself an action person. Even so, she's grateful that her photographic journey has unfolded slowly, with its ups and downs: "I've seen many artists who were too young grew up too soon, because maturity makes us more humble. Of course, shortcuts can take you far, but they don't give you the foundations. It's important to take our time to build our path.”; and for Callie the path is always where love takes her.

We levitated with Jelena Stanković through the streets of Leiria, a city she's visiting for the third time as part of her participation in the sixth Fotografar Palavras exhibition—a project that brings together photographers and writers around multiple image interpretations, and in which she participates with great enthusiasm. Her white All Star sneakers, accustomed to walking Serbian streets, are already familiar with some of the sidewalks in the historic center of this Portuguese city, especially the more run-down and less crowded ones: "Leiria is a close and very inspiring place," she states calmly and assertively.

With a degree in Classical Literature, she works in a bookstore. In fact, words have always inhabited the left side of her chest, so pen and paper have been with her since she was nine. She feels this is her way of finding herself and above all, of connecting with her inner world. A world that closes itself off during the darkest periods of her life, inevitably closing itself off to the art of writing.

It was one of those moments of separation from words that, out of a need to artistically express her creativity, led her to writing through light. Photography then emerged as an escape, a new door that opened and over time, Jelena Stanković became inseparable from her camera.

She remembers it all starting with her fascination with observing the colors of reflections in water, which led her to the artistic movement she loves most: Impressionism. At the time, still without a camera, she captured her first reflection with her cell phone (an image she shared with Ope Magazine during our tour) and from that moment on, she began to "see the world with eyes open to the small things," and then adds, "But what are the small things?"

This awakening to the reflectivity of water later made her more attentive to other types of reflections: "In the reflections of windows, many things happen, many realities are reflected, many elements interact, and somehow, everything is connected. Many moments meet in a single window." She confesses that it is only later, during the photo editing process, that many of these elements are revealed; at the moment she takes the photograph, there is only her connection to the moment and the image she can see.

Our conversation quickly returns to words, her childhood, and her father's bookshelves filled with books. She feels life through words, and this is what led her to defy her parents' wishes, who wanted her to study medicine. "When I write, I also create images in my imagination, so the image has always been there. And with the camera, you can also capture creative scenarios in life. You can use your vision to tell reality." Therefore, she doesn't intend to portray reality per se, but to create her own multiple interpretations of reality: "We live in a system of imagery repetition, and when we see the same thing over and over, we enter memorization mode. We see the world through drowsy eyes. We live in a system of reality, but I want to show that change is possible." In her opinion, we need to wake up, think about what we don't see, and seek the "deep side of reality."

Jelena Stanković spent much of her life in Belgrade, where, at the age of fourteen, she had to live alone in order to continue her studies. She also recalls when, at sixteen, her parents sent her to her grandparents house to escape the war. There, war was a distant, almost unreal vision, reaching her only through the news. She speaks of the sound of sirens, bombs, shattering glass, and her windowless house. She speaks of the spirit of unity and courage experienced in those days when, after an attack on a civilian transport convoy, she and everyone around her took to the streets with targets drawn on scrap paper with the caption "We all are targets." She remembers this time as something distant. Perhaps that's why she appreciates small moments in time and prefers to live in the present, not getting caught up in dates or numbers.

She states that she only feels complete when connected with creative energy, and this brings us to her travels to outside Serbia  in which,, in addition of bonding to the local, she has made several photographer friends from whom she says she learned to be invisible: “in some places, you need to be silent, wait, and offer smiles." From her experience, it is in this invisibility, in accepting without judgment, in this neutral energy, that one can capture reality as it is.

Just as a butterfly feeds from flower to flower, her creativity now flows into two complementary forms of expression. Therefore, we return to her relationship with words, to the time when, as a student, she wrote for a newspaper and had the opportunity to interview artists, something she never imagined was possible. She again draws the parallel between her relationship with the two arts: "Writing shows us the immaterial reality, while photography brings us the visible reality: words explain, photography shows."

A few steps further, she tells us about her diary, which initially included only genuine emotions, but which, over time, also included fiction and poetry; revealing her greatest literary inspirations: "Those who read Dostoevsky never remain the same person; he respects inner reality, and Virginia Woolf resonates with me in sensitivity." She likes to include poetry in her sentences and express her feelings in beautiful words, which is why her "sentences aren't very long either." She now admits that if she photographed her diary, her photographs would be much simpler than those she uses to express the complexity of the relationships she seeks to capture on the streets she walks.

We then return to the reason that brought her to Portugal, Leiria, and she shyly shares that in the Fotografar Palavras project, she enjoys the role of photographer more than that of writer: "My poetry is a home, but for now, in this context, it's still just an open window. Our mind is a religious love."

For Jelena Stanković, poetry and photography have something hermetic in them. Therefore, photographed reflections are also a form of poetry for her, and it is in them that she finds herself.