‘The magic we make.’ These four words constitute Creator Lab’s 9th Season pursuit, and in this statement, the whole ‘less is more’ ethos effectively enables a viciously talented legion of photographers to make their own. 

Formed as a partnership between creative agency SN37 and Google, the Creator Labs Incubator encourages rising talents in photography and film to create a variety of influential works surrounding significant cultural narratives. The Lab selects a group of artists with the abilities to author a singularly dynamic visual essay, born out of a place of sincerity and unabashed passion. Each photo released under Creator Labs is captured on the Google Pixel devices, and the latest season features the Google Pixel 9 along with all its gizmos and gadgets. The Pixel’s AI-enabled camera, along with its advanced video quality in Super Res Zoom and Night Sight Video allow for complete artistic flexibility.

Now, back to the magic we make. For its ninth season, Creator Labs tackles the infinitely varied and nuanced ways in which one approaches a project’s conception. The ‘magic’ underscores the processes distinct to each photographer, informed by the plethora of systems that have shaped their daily lives. Their likes and their dislikes. Their influences as well as their adversaries, their upbringings and their personal sentiments. Each mechanism is a tool, and each tool is magic; complicated, imaginative, cultivated magic. 

Campbell Addy, a British-Ghanaian photographer and filmmaker, turns to the ‘90s and 2000s, the heyday of independent style magazines, for his wizardry. Dimly lit photos are rendered highly-cinematic, they filter the saturated colors brushed on each scene. Popular narrative tropes of the time are employed, and Addy’s personal inflections burst through.

Gabriel Moses, on the other hand, utilizes deep tones, rich in texture with subtle, nonetheless profound, impact. He blurs the line between the memory and the lived, reinterpreting magazine covers and record albums of the ‘80s and ‘90s woven in threads of mystery and faded sensuality.

In an international sweep, the Incubator highlights the work of Japanese photographer Piczo, an underwater photography experimentalist (yes, underwater photography is another dazzling feature of the Pixel 9), and German photographer Elizaveta Porodina, formerly trained as a clinical psychologist before turning to visual art as a means of delving into human consciousness. Having documented hundreds of cover stories and campaigns, Porodina exploits the ghostly and surreal. Her eerie, dream-like style operates as a sort of Modern Renaissance, constructing an illuminated, sleek universe infiltrated by a medieval twist.

The last eight seasons of Creator Labs have witnessed the craft of over 35 photographers, as they built on the creative outlets the Incubator supplied. In the last five years, over 100 personal projects of groundbreaking work have crackled and coursed through the currents of modern media, and the Lab’s continuing effort to support budding artists remains a contemporary beaux arts stalwart, proving that with a camera (or a Pixel 9) and a vision, magic can be made.