Beregovich: Issue 102 Featured Photographer

Street photography continues to be a very popular genre of picture making, particularly for those who live in a city like New York where opportunities for making this kind of work are plentiful. The consequence of this popularity is an endless stream of street photos posted to social media platforms. In such a crowded space cliches are easy to spot, and a lot of the work starts to blend together. But in that often unvaried stream of images, some work still delivers. Beregovich is making that kind of work.

Maybe a person in one of Beregovich's photos is doing something mundane like waiting at a bus stop. Maybe, as they wait, a breeze blows their hair, and a memory runs through their mind of the way it felt when their mother would run her fingers through their hair.

That's the kind of moment I feel like Beregovich's best photos take us. We weren't there at the beginning, we won't be there at the end, we can't know what's really going on, but for a brief moment, we are in the middle of some stranger's life in all its strangeness and beauty and mystery.

I asked Beregovich to tell me a little about their life in photography:

“My last name is Beregovich and I don't know what my first name is yet. I think that's also representative of my photography, that I don't really know what to go by and I've noticed that a lot of my photos recently focus on an unknown individual. I'm a super privileged gay and non-binary person born in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn my whole life and that's where I prefer to photograph nowadays.
“When I was 15, I got the iPhone 6 just in time for a vacation with my dad to Germany and Switzerland and took a ton of photos when we were there. I wasn't ever really interested in photography but the photos I took there of the lakes and mountains in the fog and small cities made me super excited to take more and that kind of excitement was new for me and I dug it big time. Soon after, I asked my parents if we had any cameras that I could use and they handed me a Nikon D60 that we've had for years. It came with 18-55mm and 55-200mm kit lenses and that thing went almost everywhere with me. That excitement kept growing and turned into a need. I got my first "serious" camera, the Nikon D750, in late 2017 and that excitement and need only got stronger.
“When I got the D750, I turned from cityscapes and portraits of my friends to street photography pretty quickly. There's really nothing like street photography. The rush is insane and it becomes close to an addiction. But I think what makes me so attracted to it is getting to see people you would never notice otherwise and places you've walked around a thousand times become completely new and I think that's pretty neat. I especially love photos that isolate one or two people. You get to learn a lot about social behavior and learn that, as predictable as some people and scenes can be, you can't really be prepared for any one scenario or encounter and have to be open to most everything. When you start to think that way, you never get bored again. And once you start thinking that everyone is just a person and no one is above or below you, more of the world opens up to you.
“I don't think there should be any standard rules for photography. That gets boring as fuck. I think it's a good idea to learn some of the rules of composition and lighting at the beginning, but once you have that foundation, you should throw it away and do whatever you want. I focused a lot on the technical side of photography at first- all the gear and techniques- and still love learning about it, but I've learned that if I stuck to those rules written by old, straight white guys all the time, I would never get to a place where I would be happy with what I would be producing. Everyone's eyes and personal experiences are different and should influence their art first.
“Outside of photography, I'm a senior at Brooklyn College studying to be an oral historian. I really do love people and my place, I think, is to be an observer. That's what street photographers and oral historians do and that's what I'm pretty comfortable with. I think oral history and photography make a great pair for a story. Deeply listening and watching are two of the most important things I think someone can learn to do and conducting oral histories has made me a more patient photographer. I'm still semi-impatient and wanna go go go all the time but much more ready to stop and look and listen.
“Right now, I'm working on my thesis project which is an oral history and photography project called Queer People in Isolation. The project focuses on intergenerational isolation experiences of queer people aged 18+. I conduct oral histories and use photo elicitation as a tool to generate memories while integrating photography as a core part of the project. After the interviews, I take film and digital portraits of the interviewees to form a cohesive collection of people as a whole. For now, because of Covid, I'm only interviewing/photographing queer people in NYC, but if anyone would like to participate or knows someone who would and would be okay with their interviews, full names, and images being put into the public domain, please DM me @55thand3rd or email beregovich.nyc@gmail.com!”

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Photo at top of post: "Untitled" New Jersey 2021 © Beregovich

↓ ↓ ↓ All Photos in this post © Beregovich / @55thand3rd ↓ ↓ ↓