Thee Vango

My name is Marc Anthony Van Bates and I started Vango Photography on December 17, 2019. My passion for photography has developed quite recently. 

If you had told me 2 years ago that I would end up pursuing a career in photography I would have sworn you were lying. My entire life my passion has been art. Sketching, painting, sculpting, and constructing in different mediums altogether has in return, allowed me to explore endless ideas and concepts whether it was artistically, socially, or in some cases politically. 

I know the transition from an artist to a photographer isn't that drastic, but believe me, in my eyes it definitely was. I saw photography as capturing something that had already been created for you while my artistry was created completely from my own vision and emerged from my own "expansive" mind. I didn't get the concept that my artistry doesn't stop at photography; it is able to be manipulated and shapeshift into any medium of my choosing.

In High School I was apart of a marketing class. In my marketing class I was head of Branding so I was the guy who would try to sell our products through visuals. During a class period, my team was trying to come up with ideas to outreach to an untapped portion of our target market. We already had students, but we knew our big spenders were parents. I came up with the idea to create a magazine for our company, considering that parents are usually the demographic to pick up and skim through a magazine waiting in an office. We wanted the magazine to remind the parents of a fundraiser so they would feel more invoked to buy items like they would if your junior high neighbor had asked you to buy something from his/her school's fundraiser. It was through creating this magazine I gained a passion for creating imagery behind the lens.

I learned very quickly the difference between stylistic and professional photography, we were accoladed so much on the look of the magazine; "it looks so professional, I'm so impressed," keep in mind I had no experience in photography and I was using a smartphone to try and replicate Dslr quality photos, however, the Note 9’s camera fidelity didn't cease at all with its quality. For products we would sell, we took the back of white poster paper and put our items on top of the paper to resemble studio quality. Using models to dress in our spirit-wear clothes we went out and picked the most diverse and marketable models that had great influence on campus.

Creating this magazine helped me realize how much passion I had for photography, and at that point I was taking pictures all the time with my Galaxy note 9 and it actually helped me gain confidence, trying to encourage my peers modeling, to be as fierce as they wanted to be. After getting so much accreditation from my photos I realized I had an eye for photography. It was the satisfaction of seeing people feel confident taking their pictures, them feeling like they could be on the cover of Vogue, be a Nike model, and feel valued in their own right.

As of recently I've noticed a shift in my focus, More than having beautiful art I want my photography to talk, and exploit itself. I opted to make my alias Vango; Van is part of my middle name which was the middle name of my grandfather and great grandfather so I wanted the legacy of that name to carry on. The “go” part inspired by the artist Vincent Van Gogh was added because of how well I understood his motives, and his end result, and how much unmet potential can evade one's well deserved triumph. Van Gogh was a vastly emotional artist and as he matured he simplified his art in a rebellion against impressionist romanticization in which he was a vanguard/Avant-garde, which I would notably call myself in my French class. By simplifying his still-life pictures with more solid colors, avant-gardes wanted to reveal how simple matters in life are, and how they are not understood by a superfluous world. A fellow artist that worked alongside Van Gogh Émile Henri Benard said "everything that is superfluous in a spectacle is covering it with reality and occupying our eyes instead of our mind. You have to simplify the spectacle in order to make some sense of it. You have, in a way, to draw its plan." I believe this doctrine has not only been applicable to me sometimes but especially in the cluttered world we live in today, somethings may need to be cutoff to be understood. 

The Vango alias I  gave myself means to be a vanguard in your art, and though it may not be understood now, it will be when given its reign in due and necessary time, much like how Van Gogh's work was appreciated more after his death. Van Gogh is a reminder to me to know my value and worth and that everything I do with dedication isn't in vain. I believe that Van Gogh cut off his ear to explicitly say he felt unheard which is why he always voices himself through his work. Sometimes it's things we need to see and not hear to be understood.

I plan to rip the bandages off through my art because my explicitness is vital to mirror what may be perceived as false and what may be seen as truth. You can call me Marc, Vango, Thee Vango, Thee Vanguard, Avant-Garde, etc. Though they all stand for a definition of a rebellious artist.