Photographer Timothy McGurr, who goes by the moniker 13th Witness online, isn't your average daredevil Instagrammer. He doesn't like being pigeonholed as any one type of photographer — and don't even try asking him what type of camera he uses.
Whether he's shooting Manhattan from the edge of a helicopter seat, or Beyonce backstage, McGurr's style straddles the spectrum of immersion. At a time when many photographers carve out a specific niche and then define themselves as such through their work, Tim's style is hard to pin down. His feed hints at intimate portraiture one moment, then shifts the viewer to a scenic snowstorm the next. Yet it's McGurr's adventurous attitude that consistently shines through, attracting more than 666,000 followers on Instagram and plenty of commercial clients.
We caught up with McGurr to talk about some of his wildest photographic adventures, how he got into the world of photography, and his recent travels to India.
Business Insider: It seems like so many photographers simply stick to one style. You don't see as much of a range in subject matter in photography with a lot of other people these days.
Tim McGurr: I’m the kind of photographer who will shoot what I like. If it catches my eye and it interests me, I'll shoot it. I don't discriminate if it's a person, [or] if it's a place, whatever it is.
It's all fair game to me — I'll shoot anything. I like to show the beautiful side of the world, and then the not-so-beautiful side.
BI: You went to Japan after high school and you ended up staying for 4 years. What's the story behind that?
TM: In high school I started to kind of f--- around. My father thought that it would be a good idea for me to maybe take a trip to Japan. I was close to not graduating high school because of attendance [and] other issues. [But]I made a push and graduated. And then two weeks later, I was out to Fukuoka, Japan, to do a homestay with a family.
After a couple of weeks I was like, "Man this place is special." I was really immersed in the culture. It just made so much sense to me, and I didn't want to leave. And then I met a Japanese girl and that's when everything kind of took a turn, you know, because I stopped working. On a return flight from a trip to Hawaii I remember trying to come back to Tokyo, and I was in line at immigration and they just came up behind me. They had a printout of every entry and exit over the last couple of years. They had me in a room to question me and they wanted to know what was happening, was I working illegally?
BI: They got you doing visa runs.
TM: Yeah. Over the course of several years.
BI: And then you're out.
TM: That [run-in with immigration] was abrupt and unexpected. When I got sent back home I was legit confused like, "What do I do with my life now?" Suddenly, I found myself back here in New York.
A friend of mine who worked for a TV network managed to get me a job freelancing. After a while, the TV company promoted me to full-time staff.
BI: Which some would say is more of a burden rather than a blessing.
TM: I did not look at it as a blessing. I looked at it like, "Wow, you know what, this is not my destiny." I didn't go [to] Japan to come back to work on TV. Freelance was fun, but I wasn't going to be shackled by Viacom. I had to tell them no. And so I quit.
And right when I quit, that's when I took a leap of faith into photography. From that moment I went a thousand miles an hour into photography, shooting every day. Going out, walking around shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting.
Soon after, I started to get paid for my [work] and that's when I realized like, "Whoa, I can do this." Fast forward a couple years later, and I was on a trip to San Francisco doing a video shoot. A friend of mine showed me this app, he's like, "It's called Instagram." So I downloaded it, and this [was] right at the beginning of Instagram, and nobody knew what it would become.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider