“The photography does not show the reality, it shows the idea which someone has of it”
– Neil Leifer
My name is Noah Markunas, and I am a photographer that is based in central Illinois. My skills as a photographer are mainly focused on sports photography, street photography and product/e-commerce photography. I am currently working as a product photographer for the corporate company, Syndigo LLC, and also work as a team photographer for the Bloomington Bison of the East Coast Hockey League. I am also currently pursuing an associate’s degree in art at Illinois Central College and plan to complete my bachelor’s degree in Studio Art with a BFA focus on photography.
Throughout my work in sports photography, I take what I’ve learned from teachers, professors and other respected professionals and incorporate creative elements into my art. I see it as very important to see sports as a pre-existing work of art and I just work at capturing the parts that best represent different aspects of whatever sport I am photographing. The art that I speak of is the raw emotion that you can see on the faces of the athletes and fans. I want the viewer to feel the emotions that the subjects are showing in my photos. The joys of victory and the devastation of defeat and everything in between are the details of sports that I aim to show in my work. I aim to focus on the foreground and background heavily in my photographic style, showing that there is a whole world and story happening outside of the main subject. I take great inspiration from minimalist photography where the main subject is just a small portion of the frame and the rest is taken up by the surrounding environment, which can be seen in photographs taken by photographers such as Ben Ludeman of the Buffalo Sabres, Harrison Bardon of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
I work in sports photography because I grew up watching my brother playing baseball, and I saw the joy that it brought to him when he played. That led me to play baseball myself, but when my playing career ending in high school, I took my slight knowledge of photography and used it to take photos for the Washington varsity baseball team. That season made me fall in love with photography even more. I became obsessed with the chase to get better and get the perfect shot. Now three years removed, I’ve gone from volunteering my services to now working as a team photographer for a professional hockey team and I have also expanded into the world of street photography
Persistence is a key to my past and future success in photography. I will always do whatever it takes to become the best photographer that I can be and will find any opportunity to do so. Beethoven once said: “it seemed impossible to me to leave this world before I had produced all that I felt capable of producing…” (Beethoven, The Heiligenstadt Testament, 1802)
