Peninajoy research.

Penina Momoeisea

From reading Penina's blog I can tell Straight away she has a laid back personality and has a a lot of creative friends who have helped her get to where she is today. She states in her blog that she started out by posting on tumblr photos of Tattoos and the stories behind them until her favourite blogger told her to make a blog because she was 'messing up his tumblr feed', and so she did. Penina is a travel agent as well as a photographer which works really well together because not only is she traveling around the world she is also capturing beautiful images of it. Penina photographs a lot of gigs, tattoo's and street art, reading her comments under the photos she always some how knows the person she is photographing, one of the people she photographed was her hairdresser. Penina seems like a real people person and sees life through her lense, obviously photography is a big passion of hers.
Penina told us when she came to tell us about herself and her passion for photography that she always loved taking photos even when she was little she had little film camera and she would take photos of everything and everyone. 10 years ago she brought a canon film camera luckily her sister had done photography in 6 form knew how to develop film in the dark room and was able to help her, Penina told us that she wanted a film camera because then she didn't have the option of deleting the photos so she had to make sure she got everything perfect before taking the photo seeing as though its  not an easy process developing film. Because Penina comes from the islands she said she never had things like 'photography' in school so she never learnt about it, she just had to teach herself... which is not a bad things because i feel you learn so much from practice! 
The church that Penina went to had a creative arts ministry, she did start off as a dancer but she was far too 'lanky' for that so she switched over to creative arts where instead of drawing she used her camera, the first project she was given was called 'Me Myself and I' which was about you and how you saw yourself, Penina showed us her two photo boards which was like a collage of her family, friends and south Aukland (Graffitied walls and road signs) she had random black and white photos throughout the board which represented her being a half cast because her mum is Pakeha and her dad is Islander.

Penina told us about her love for hiphop and how she has many friends who are in bands so she goes and photographs them when they have a gig. Through getting out there and building relationships with people in the industry she has been given the opportunity to photograph many different events and people. Penina is often asked to do promo shots for fresh Tv and Coconet.

Penina is apart of a photography group called 'The society' where they meet up in different places around auckland and photograph that area, she said its interesting because everyone has such different styles so even if they do photograph the same thing they always end up having a such a different shot. Raymond Sagapolutele is the leader of the group.

http://www.karenishiguro.com - Link to one of Penina's favourite photographers. I really love Karens work, relates a lot to what i am doing for my portfolio.

Hawai'i

Auckland.

Image Responses

I really liked Penina's concept of photographing Tattoos and telling the story behind them, so i took that idea and twisted into my own style, Penina's photos of the tattoos are more Candid photographs but because i love to photograph people i decided i would make my photographs more like portraits, i wanted to know the people i photographed so they would feel relaxed around me and i could capture that, i photographed three people from my village, here is their stories.

Josephine whom i know as Josie is originally from Samoa, she studied baking at MIT and now works full time at a local Cafe. When i asked her what the tattoo means she giggled and said "It's just my name in Chinese". I couldn't really tell how she felt about it but i know that i thought it was beautiful and i really liked where it was placed. She did tell me that it was her friend who did the tattoo, unsure if the friend was professional or not but they sure did a good job.

Ada recently moved into the village but as soon as I met her we instantly clicked, Ada is a mum of one but soon to be two, i asked her a little bit about her tattoo and heres her reply 

"It was my brothers 

friend who did my tat in 2013, I only got it because he was my first born and that I really wanted his 

name to be with me always (as much as I don't like his name) but now my son is always with me no

matter where I go. I was 20 when I had Irwin ! I regret getting it there but every time I look at my 

sons name I feel safe, loved and happy"