“This idea of photographers going through unimaginable tasks just to get an image is in the past now,” he claims. “A video game can be just as fruitful a canvas for a photographer as the real world is.”
Sang has created in-game photos for marketing campaigns from major gaming publishers and companies like Activision and Nvidia, and, above and beyond that, he spends a lot of his days as a hobbyist trying to capture moments with emotional substance on games such as Grand Theft Auto V and Cyberpunk2077. This might involve spending hours carefully arranging dead bodies in a Wild West tavern in order to construct a menacing smoking gun shot, or shooting an intimate juncture where a character is lost in a daydream amid a futuristic neon landscape. Often, he tries to photograph fleeting gaming moments that have a direct correlation to the everyday humdrum of real life.
One of the shots he considers among his greatest shows bloodied Resident Evil 3 heroine Jill Valentine having an introspective moment while sitting on a train carriage; Sang describes the intent behind it with the seriousness of an artist describing a work of theirs hanging on a wall in a prestigious exhibition. “Despite feeling bruised by the world, we all still commute into work [or at least, we did before the pandemic] and act like everything is normal. A bloodied Jill gave me this feeling of a regular person looking through the window while commuting – just carrying on despite it all.”
The shot undoubtedly captures a very relatable sense of perseverance and therefore furthers the way video games now offer genuine soul-searching moments, even amid fantastical apocalyptic horror settings.
The benefits of ‘virtual photography’
Sang’s work has been hung in art exhibitions in Los Angeles and London (alongside fellow screenshotter Duncan Harris) – revealing how the lines between real-life photographs and in-game screenshots are blurring. In 2018, having worked in advertising and graphic design, Sang became disillusioned with his professional life and switched careers for photography, quickly making an income shooting live music and events. However, due to the high levels of crime in São Paulo (“It was dangerous to carry a camera”) and a nagging feeling that he couldn’t possibly compete with more established photographers (whose bigger budgets enabled privileges such as travelling), Sang traded the “elitism” of real-world photography for the virtual world, and began to make freelance money by creating promotional screenshots.
Sang, who has turned an escapist hobby into a living, believes that one of the exciting aspects of video-game photography, from the perspective of the practitioner, is its accessibility. “For a lot of people, it isn’t affordable to just buy a camera or sustain a photographer lifestyle. For others, it’s just too dangerous. The good thing about video-game photography is you don’t need academic experience. You are given the tools straight away and are free to experiment. I could instantly be shooting a battlefield in Northern France or a futuristic Cyberpunk city; there’s no barriers for entry.”