Based in Canada, Henry Mah has enjoyed a 30 year career as an art photographer and multi-disciplinary artist. Mah graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University’s prestigious photography program in 1995. Hired by Jeff Wall (Gagosian) as one of his studio assistants, a position he held for 7 years, Mah worked alongside such contemporaries as Scott MacFarland, Stephen Waddell, Evan Lee and Owen Kydd.
In his current art photography practice, Mah relies on both instinct and precalculation to survey vernacular scenes and urban topographies. Using natural light and available subjects, Mah’s photographs suggest an artful objectivity as he seeks to find the curious in the commonplace and the charged mystery in chance moments. As a street photographer with a formalist bent, Mah’s willfully casual portraits of people caught unaware and unvarnished feel both detached and intimate. In such images as Lunch, Beachcomber and Drawing Melbourne Skyline, the banal acquires a heightened sense of reality. Each feels enigmatic, containing secrets. In Building HK and Coney Island, Mah also discerns the grand intricacy of everyday life in scenes teeming with detail, drama and visual splendour. For Mah, the ordinary world contains a coded language made up of art historical references, latent connections and private associations. Mining this territory with a careful eye, Mah makes the familiar and prosaic strangely compelling.
Henry Mah’s photographs are represented by Monica Reyes Gallery (Vancouver) and Paul Kuhn Gallery (Calgary). For commercial and creative projects, please contact the studio.
Select prints from this website are available for purchase upon request.