10 Magazine USA Daniel, You Are a Star

The late photographer Daniel King had an infectious curiosity, whether he was documenting youth cultures around the world or making art at home in New York’s Rockaway Beach. This is a tribute to his beautiful and joyful spirit.

The photographer Daniel King was everyone’s hype man when it came to surfing the waves at his adopted neighborhood of Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York. “Dan was always encouraging of everyone’s ride,” says Emma Hastil, the girlfriend of the late photographer, who was tragically killed in an automobile accident in the city earlier this year. It’s no easy feat to infiltrate a crowd as territorial as that of the Rockaway surfing community, but King, an Australian native, had a special talent for making friends in the most unlikely of places.

King moved from Sydney to Spain at the age of 19, after only a year of studying photography. Soon enough, he headed to London, before moving to New York City in 2004, where he began working with major lensmen like Steven Klein and Dan Jackson, and then, for a spell, returned to the U.K. to assist David Sims. “Dan [King] was very well researched. He knew what color treatment he wanted for a photo,” says Simon Burstall, a photographer who formed a close friendship with King when they were both assistants to those A-list photographers in the early aughts. “Dan had his own style. It was lo-fi but skillful. He did the bare minimum with props and no hair and little makeup because he wanted to get to the essence of a person.” Fittingly, The New York Times described King’s work as “somewhere between Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.” This honest, unvarnished aesthetic would soon have him shooting for everyone from Harper’s Bazaar to Converse.

But it was his interest in youth cultures around the world that would result in King’s most personal and arresting images. “Daniel had an uncanny ability to get close to his subjects, to be able to jump into their world and be welcomed,” says his brother-in-law, the photographer-filmmaker Patrick Sher. “He chased the subject of youth around the world, from Beirut to Arkansas.”

In late 2013, King traveled to Ukraine, when the country was on the brink of a civil war. Setting up camp in Kyiv’s Independence Square and armed with only his camera and a translator, he set about capturing the scene of local teenagers right before the country’s revolution. He went to skate parks and lakeside swim parties, befriending adolescents who were enjoying their last days of freedom—stealing kisses, daydreaming in empty parking lots, partying late into the night. “One night he stayed up with the kids and woke up in a park with a stick-and-poke tattoo of a wombat,” Hastil says. “He was a little embarrassed, but that didn’t stop him.”

King would first get to know his subject before pointing the camera at anyone. “His subjects opened up to him because he was patient. He knew how to step back and let them do their thing,” Hastil says. The result was his 2015 book, Ukraine Youth: Between Days.

Over the next few years, King’s curiosity would lead him to places like Beirut, where he documented teens popping wheelies in abandoned parking lots and driving bumper cars. In Kazakhstan, he photographed a young girl staring dreamily in a field, as well as a stroller covered with a baby blanket standing in front of a tarp-shrouded military plane. The images are intimate and innocent, melancholy and sweet, loaded and prosaic. They embody the universal spirit of youth and promise with all the attendant excitement and ennui. “You can see from the energy of Daniel’s photographs that he was a participant. They are a reflection of his view of fleeting youth, a reflection of Daniel’s enduring childlike spirit,” Sher says.

Even Stateside, King’s curiosity never diminished. “Dan believed in output, even before input. Even if it’s not great, it’s always about creating,” says Hastil, who is also an artist. When the pandemic hit, the couple spent a lot of time creating, whether drawing in visual journeys (also seen on these pages), making brightly colored Memphis-style furniture and objects, or starting Locus of the Occult, a design label featuring graphic tees, incense burners, and clocks, among other items. “During lockdown, we were doing arts and crafts before leading up to launching our line. Once you realize you can just try something, trial and error, it opens you up to doing more.”

King always seemed to be doing more. He had plans to shoot in Vietnam, Africa, and the northern reaches of Siberia. As Sher sums up: “The overused myth of a photographer being a fly on the wall was just that to Daniel—a myth.”

Photographer and Artist DANIEL KING

PHOTOGRAPH OF DANIEL KING BY EMMA HASTIL

Instagram: @daniel_w_king

danielking.com