Austin Bruce

Austin Bruce takes the photographs behind the SALTYmf brand, most of them in black and white.

Brad pulled him into the McBastard studio with about five minutes of warning, told him he would hate it, and did it anyway, on the grounds that the people behind the camera never get seen. Brad had come across his work about a year earlier and liked it because it was raw. There was no interview and no portfolio review, they just met and it fit. Sitting there they worked out that both of them are colorblind, which neither had mentioned to the other before.

His full name is William Austin Bruce, which is where WAB Photography comes from, and he also shoots for Open Heart Media. He has had a camera since he was fifteen, twenty years now. Ansel Adams is a favourite, and he says black and white makes you look at the world differently. He does not direct much. He would rather photograph someone doing their own thing and let the taking of the picture be the whole interaction, partly because he is uncomfortable telling people what to do and partly because that is what he wants to look at. The athletes SALTYmf brings in ask for him by name for the same reason. None of them want to give a camera the Zoolander face, and he never asks them to.

In high school his art teacher told him she did not think he would enjoy art school, because of the people he would be around and the person he was. He heard it as being told he was not good enough and put the whole idea away for years. He worked land surveying instead and kept getting hollered at on site for stopping to take pictures, and when friends told him he should do it properly he filed that under things that do not happen. He found it again in recovery. There was a camera in the marketing department at No Longer Bound, and a woman there named Carol Smith taught him, left him handwritten notes and edits, and told him he would have to be able to take what he likes and be okay with it when people do not like what he takes. He has carried a camera every day since, for almost three years.

What he shoots for SALTYmf is not product. His boss at Open Heart put it to him as documenting what these people are doing with their lives, and Bruce describes it as getting to shoot other people's memories back to them. Trips, studio days, whatever is happening while the cameras are already running. He says he did not mean to get into this, that he had two aunts who made art and understood it as a hobby rather than a job, and that he still does not know how he got where he has gotten. He calls it a gift he was given at the time he needed it.