5-Year-Old Photographer Hawkeye Huey Talks About His Art

When you're 5 years old, you have a different perspective on the world. And that's not just because you're shorter than a lot of the people around you.

Hawkeye Huey (yes, that's his real name) has been taking photographs for the past year or so, and the results garnered a spot on Rolling Stone's list of top 100 Instagram accounts. The Record's David Hyde talked to Hawkeye and his dad, National Geographic photographer Aaron Huey.

Huey took his son on a trip around the West last November. He's working on a Kickstarter project to publish a book of his son's photos of the American West.

Huey said Hawkeye approaches the world a different way.

“A 4-year-old doesn’t use a camera the way that you or I do and they don’t think about those frames or ideas or meme or compositions the way that an adult does,” Huey said.

“Hawkeye can establish intimacy immediately because he’s not threatening and he makes people happy and he makes people smile. People don’t feel threatened by this project. They feel like he’s giving them something.”

Huey said he has reimagined his own photography after seeing how Hawkeye experiences the world.

“Hawkeye doesn’t look at a situation and think oh the light’s not good enough or this isn’t going to work out,” Huey said. “Sometimes I turn off my vision and I say this isn’t going to make pictures. Everything can make pictures if you turn that vision on. He’s got it on all the time.”

Below you can see three of Hawkeye's photos and hear him explain what was behind their creation.

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This story was produced for the Web by Gil Aegerter.