Kristoffer Paulsen

Bio

Kristoffer is a photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. I received my first camera from my parents in the sixth grade. It was a plastic 110 film camera. It was green. It was probably terrible, but I didn’t care; I was hooked. I went on to do what all photo nerds did in the nineties at high school, spending every minute I could in the darkroom burning through as much paper and film as I could. The thrill of seeing an image magically appear on a piece of paper sloshing around a tub of chemicals is one that’s never faded (unlike many prints that 16 year old me rushed through the fixer), and seems to live in the satisfaction I get when I finally hit “Save As” on an image today. I was lucky enough to study photography for the grand total of $200 in 2001 at Ultimo Tafe. It blows my mind that what feels like such a recent memory was well before digital cameras were commonplace, and most of the course was on old Mamiya RB67 cameras. I managed to ace most of my subjects, except for the small business subject, where for my business plan assignment I wrote something akin to “take good photos and get paid for it”. Sure enough I failed the subject, and therefore the entire course. Ironically I’m one of a bare few in my year that ended up working as a photographer (turns out it wasn’t such a bad plan after all). After a decade or so assisting, random crappy jobs then working in music for a while, I finally got serious about this being my career and decided to go after it. I worked my way up through various online editorial publications, slowly honing my look and feel into something I was happy with. My background and education in music (I snuck a music degree into that decade in the wilderness) gave me a point of view that diverges from most photographers. Where many are happy with a pretty picture, I’ve always sought out images that compel us, images that tell a story.