Maya Fuhr's new project adds a slick, 80s-inspired editorial feel to a hospital setting

We’ve long been fans of Maya Fuhr’s honest, bright and candid photography: from her snapshots of girls’ messy bedrooms, artists and their diaries and college freshers to slick but esoteric editorial shoots, her work always feels fresh and places the viewer in the action.

Her latest project marks something of a departure in content rather than style, and saw Maya working with Yamaha Canada Music on its project to help hard-of-hearing people hear music. The brand worked with Cochlear implant patients to reunite them with their passion for music, by surprising them with live music performances. These form part of a wider web project, Random Acts of Music, where people can view a film that documents the performances and can also submit their own sonic surprises.

Maya got involved in the project through The Metrick System agency, which was collaborating with Yamaha on realising the project. “They contacted me and thought I’d be a perfect storyteller alongside the talented director of the video, Goh Iromoto,” says Maya. “The aim was to give the Cochlear Implant Clinic [at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital] a larger audience through sharing our strong visual aesthetics via the internet.”

Goh adds: “I think live performance is the most emotionally powerful form of musical expression. The fact that some of these patients had that gift taken away through hearing loss will make for an emotional reunion.”

Cochlear implants are electronic devices surgically inserted into a patient’s ear. They can help patients that are deaf or partially deaf through damage to sensory hair cells in their cochleas by replicating the different frequencies and amplitudes of sound. Implants can augment hearing sufficiently to improve understanding of speech and environmental sounds, although the quality of sound is different from natural hearing and the input subject to different neural regulation.

Maya’s stills are wonderfully shot, using a Pentax K1000 35mm camera with a Pentax flash from the 80s that makes them look instantly like a cool editorial, whether its the still life compositions of instruments or 3D diagrams or in touching portraits of the patients.

“It was really easy for me to apply the way I usually work with this subject because the clinic itself happened to be incredibly cool looking with its pink tiled floor, yellow walls and the retro looking diagrams,” she says. “My soft colour palette was laid out for me and the sincerity and vulnerability that the patients embodied was not far off from what I usually look for in my subjects either.”

The photos are eery, colourful, soft and intimate, forming a series of images that cast a new light on the clinic and its patients that elevates them into something that’s fun and fascinating. “For people who have a passion for music, losing the ability to hear impacts more than just everyday life,” says Maya. “It slowly disconnects them from an aspect of their life that they once drew great pleasure from. Yamaha Canada Music is launching a project to reunite Cochlear Implant patients with their passion and draw attention to an often overlooked disability.”