There is something faintly absurd about a photography and videography practice starting a blog. We are camera operators, not writers. Our expertise belongs entirely to the imagery on this website, yet the modern world insists that professionals should not merely possess an eye for light, form, and the quiet observation of human behaviour; one must also regularly birth a sequence of sentences known to the vulgar as “content.”
We are told by the high priests of digital marketing that to exist, we must feed the online beast with a steady diet of search-engine-optimised attention seeking. We are instructed that a blog is an indispensable engine for attracting audiences and securing enquiries, and that the modern trade requires us to publish regular, automated essays — “Top Ten Tips for a Stress-Free Morning,” or “How to Choose Your Bridal Bouquet Based on Your Star Sign” — each containing the smallest permissible quantity of intelligible thought, and each found, almost word for word, littered across a dozen indistinguishable sites.
Let us be entirely candid: we would vastly prefer not to write this blog at all, as, we suspect, would most of the others. We would much rather be far too busy perfecting our craft than sitting at a desk forming sentences for robots to scan, so that we may be placed in convenient positions to be noticed by you.
But we live in an attention economy, and we find ourselves at a keyboard late at night simply because the conditions of modern commerce require it. If we must cooperate with the marketplace to be noticed, we intend to do so whilst dragging our feet. We refuse to be blended into the indistinguishable mincemeat of modern marketing copy, in which every studio website reads exactly the same and you cannot tell what cow the content came from.
We have no magnificent blueprint for what these pages will contain, nor any intention of pretending that we do. We spend our lives thinking about the practice of images and art, not essays, although the two may sometimes, fortunately, collide; it is simply not our principal concern.
What this blog will attend to, what it will talk about, or what it will eventually become is, for the moment, entirely unknown to us. We will talk about something, we hope, when the occasion demands it — whether it is a reflection on a piece of gear, a particular quality of light, or the peculiar trends that circle around weddings, family sessions, and portraits for artists and makers. We have no desire to herd these observations into a highly contrived content strategy. We have no grand plan, but hope, at the very least, that they remain genuinely useful and educational, rather than merely littered with search-engine optimisation or our own undignified attempts to leap upon the latest trend.
We certainly have no intention of using these pages to announce our own merits, nor to rehearse the supposed quality of our work; our actual images can, we hope, conduct that argument perfectly well without us.
If the lens has taught us anything across weddings, family sessions, and our work with artists and makers, it is that a carefully contrived and overly planned pose will always fall short of an unscripted reality. It has taught us, too, that the surest way to miss a day is to arrive having already decided what it must become. The moment a thing is pursued solely for the reward it promises, rather than for the strange pleasure of doing it well, the reward itself becomes thinner, rarer, and rather less worth having. A photographer who spends the day hunting for the image they conceived before the day began is very likely to overlook the better one unfolding, with complete indifference to their ambitions, directly in front of them; so we suspect, and perhaps more ardently hope, the case will be the same here too. We have also found the camera to be a terribly honest instrument. It routinely exposes the friction between how a moment actually felt and how a passing fashion dictated it ought to look. We therefore suspect that the only way to rescue our work — and this blog — from the general vulgarity of the internet and its content is to remain answerable to what is actually true, rather than to construct an illusion merely to satisfy an expectation or trend.
To act natural on command is, after all, a remarkably exhausting pose for anyone to maintain, and the camera is far better suited to witnessing reality than to manufacturing it. That, at least, is the intention for this blog as much as for our photographs and videos: we would vastly prefer to fail against a standard of honesty than to succeed at an illusion. If you are interested in a practice that prefers the spontaneous dignity of the unposed to the polished safety of a trend, we invite you to follow along as we attempt to discover what such a practice looks like — in our imagery and now, apparently, in our writing.
