About Ben Kepka

How I got here

Rather than writing some boring spiel about what I do, from the third person perspective, like an Australian, I’d rather just tell a story.

It was 2011, and I was at Wellington airport changing my seat for a flight home to Napier. I collected my new ticket and raced to the departure lounge, only to see that my flight was delayed. I was still sweating when I sat down next to a cute girl. I asked her if she was going to Napier. She smiled and said, a little disappointed, “Yes, but it’s delayed.” She turned out to be from Switzerland, and I asked her where she was sitting. As fate would have it, I had just changed my seat to be right next to her.

A year and eight months later I said goodbye to my family and boarded a plane to Switzerland. I’d taken six months of frantic German lessons and felt reasonably prepared. Then I collected my bag, swung the camera around my neck, and headed for my new home — a small village half an hour from Basel — where I learned that Swiss-German and German are two very different languages. For the first four months I lived on a dairy farm, trying to earn my keep. With my limited Swiss-German I wasn’t the most responsive to being yelled at in an agricultural context, so I mostly defaulted to a smile.

The camera quickly became my best friend. It came everywhere while I worked through every course and workshop I could find. Eventually it dawned on me that thousands of photos sitting on a hard drive weren’t doing anyone any good, so I started a little blog called Cultured Kiwi.

A year on, I’d moved off the farm into the city and found work as a facade engineer in Basel, where I could finally speak English all day. I was freshly single and ready to take on the world when a twelve-page letter arrived, in German, announcing that my visa had expired — it had been tied to the relationship that brought me over. Swiss friends and colleagues helped me write letter after letter to the government, and after months of back and forth my stay was extended. The clock was still ticking, though. The new deadline was eighteen months.

So I had a choice: head back to New Zealand, or move to London. Going home felt like giving up on the journey partway through, so I went to see the Queen.

London has been good to me. It let me stretch out professionally and creatively, and it photographs like nowhere else — layer after layer of it. For a while, work took me onto some of the buildings that make up the skyline itself, which meant photographing the city from places most people never get to stand. With six airports on the doorstep it also became the launch pad for most of the essays on this site.

That brings me to now. I don’t know what the future will bring, but this is where I document the journey.