When it comes to favorite subject matter, the answer is obvious for commercial and editorial photographer Kiu Kayee: “I like to work with people,” says the self-proclaimed extravert, who is based in Los Angeles. Whether she’s creating a personal project or working for a commercial or editorial client, her medium is portraiture. “I’m really interested in people’s faces,” she says. “When I go outside, I’m looking at everybody passing by me. I’m always looking at what people are doing around me and listening to conversations and finding subject matter from my daily life.”

IN THEIR OWN SPACE

Kiu grew up in Hong Kong and found her way to photography via film school. “I originally wanted to be a director, and when I was 18 years old, I went to college for filmmaking,” she explains. In addition to filmmaking classes, she took an elective in photography, which is where she met her mentor. “Eventually I realized filmmaking is more like a group project,” she says. “You work with a lot of people, and that involves a lot of decision making and human problems.” She craved “something more pure to express myself,” she says, and photography felt like the solution. She quit film school and moved from Hong Kong to Los Angeles to study photography.

In her photography degree program, she took a lot of fine art classes, dabbling in abstraction, mixed media, and print transfer. “I was just trying to explore what I like to do and develop my own style,” she explains. Human beings quickly became her favorite subjects. Her film studies influence her sensibility as a photographer, she says. “It’s all about telling a story and working with people,” but instead of making a film, it’s asking, “How can I use a more abstract form for my photos, a simpler way to express different people’s feelings?”

She also found that she enjoys photographing subjects where they are most comfortable, which continues to be a throughline in her portrait work. She began by photographing friends in their own spaces and eventually expanded to other subjects. “Whenever I would travel, I would just bump into strangers and talk to them, and I don’t know how, but I would just end up being in their house having a photo session,” she laughs. It sounds dangerous, she admits, but it enabled her to more authentically photograph the subject in their own space, which continues to be her ideal portrait locale.

In fact, when singer-songwriter Billie Eilish’s agent reached out to Kiu to photograph Eilish (above) early in her career, Kiu asked Eilish’s mother, who managed the singer at the time, if she could do the session in their home. “We spent quite a half day together talking about music,” she says of photographing Eilish, with whom she easily connected. “She was a really independent girl at her age; she had a really strong voice already and very confident.” Kiu also met Eilish’s brother, Finneas O’Connell, and was able to photograph the siblings together, an image she believes came out so well because of their strong bond and the rapport she developed with them during the session. “They have a really deep connection between brother and sister.”

When Kiu creates portraits, she prefers to spend time with the subjects to “kind of know who I am shooting and to make them comfortable” before she begins making images. “It’s me also enjoying it,” she says. “It’s like a meditation to me, knowing them and knowing myself. When I am taking a photo of them, it’s like a reflection of myself in my photo. Sometimes I feel like how you shoot, which side you are showing of them, it’s your choice. I’m not saying it’s staged and it’s not a real thing, but it’s like I am choosing what part of them to show.” So, in that way her photos reveal her subject as much as they reveal her. 

CAT LOVER

Though art school trained Kiu in photography technique, it didn’t teach her how to land work as an editorial and commercial photographer, she says. “Everyone can take photos now,” she points out. “The iPhone is an amazing camera,” and AI makes creating quality photographs even more accessible to the masses. But though everyone has a camera, not everyone is “trying to shoot something new every day or every week,” she explains. Consistently creating new work all the time is the key to attracting editorial and commercial clients, as well as catching the eye of art galleries, she adds.

While Kiu still makes some cold calls and sends emails to share her work with agencies, she now finds posting to and curating her Instagram account is just as effective at attracting work. Each week, she tweaks the photos on her Instagram account and posts new work, avoiding reposting from her archives to make sure her work is always fresh. When a potential client or a gallery takes notice of your work, she says, they don’t necessarily hire you immediately: they watch your account to see how your work evolves. 

Most recently, Kiu attracted a book deal when a publisher came across her work on Instagram. When she was struggling to come up with a theme for the book, she decided to go with what made her happy, a quirky combination of some of her passions as an artist and a person: photographing people in their own spaces … in the nude … with their cats.

“I’m really obsessed with Edward Weston’s work,” she explains. “When I first started shooting nudes, I was more interested in the body form and the lighting. It’s more like I see it as an abstract thing. … I feel like what you wear, it’s also your identity. So, I’m interested in when you are not wearing anything, trying to identify yourself. It’s just what is left. It’s you. That is why I’m interested in shooting people in the nude.” For the book, she plans to photograph 50 to 100 nude and half-nude female subjects from different countries, living in different cities, in their homes with their cats.

Recently she posted on Instagram that she was traveling to Tokyo and was looking for subjects with cats to photograph in their homes. “I got all these DMs” she says. She relishes the strange turns of the process. For example, some of the subjects who reached out to her looked completely different in person than they did in their Instagram photos. And she was often further surprised by the looks of their cats and their living quarters. She was particularly enamored with one short-legged, long-haired cat that was unusually malleable about being moved around and being held during the session. “It was amazingly cute; I couldn’t deal with it,” she laughs. The subject lived “in this crazy place that wasn’t really the vibe of the cat,” she says. “I love these surprises.”

The book project has been an excellent way for Kiu to reignite her creativity. “You have to do something that makes you happy to keep your passion,” she says. “I have been shooting a long time and sometimes I feel tired. [I think], why am I still shooting? And, Oh, my god, AI can do everything,” she chuckles. “This project is helping me. It’s a meditation for me. And meeting these animals makes me happy.” 

Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.