Technique
Q. You’ve worked with a number of household names – does the dynamic change when your subject has much less experience in front of a camera? A. I’d say very few people actually like having their picture taken. Even working with the biggest athletes with huge followings, what they actually want is to be on a pitch playing sport. I’m still going into someone else’s world – maybe their training ground – and they’re giving me their time and energy, and it’s my job to photograph the essence of who they are in a very short amount of time. That’s the same for anyone. I found it easier for this campaign because the subjects were willing. There was a collective desire of wanting these “TO HAVE THAT MUCH POWER AND QUALITY INSIDE A COMPACT CAMERA IS AMAZING”
photos or not. She said they’d all get a chance to feed back – and that was important to me. I don’t want anyone to feel they don’t have control over their own image. We did a launch event where we had all the photos printed on big foam boards, and seeing everyone with the images around them was special. Everyone had really nice things to say. One woman said to me, ‘I didn’t think photography was a job or a skill, but now I can see why it is.’ Q. What made you choose the FUJIFILM GFX100RF for this project? A. I wanted to have something small, so that I could go into the room and be very underwhelming and friendly, because this was part of a bigger campaign. For most of these women, there were huge film crews going into their houses. To create a commercial like this, you need so many people – and I had heard a few of the women say that they had no idea all these people would be involved. I wanted to make sure that when it was my turn to go in, which was almost always after the main commercial crew, they could relax a little bit. I wanted them to feel instantly like I was just a friend popping in with a camera. I didn’t want to have this big elaborate and intimidating set-up. When my agent got to the launch, the first person she spoke to was one of the subjects, who said, ‘Oh, I know
images to exist, to show similar people that they can do it too.
The approach is always the same for me – it’s about the person first. I really want them to shine, and I will flex to whatever they need to do that. Q. Do you have a preference for this kind of work? A. Anything that has purpose behind it speaks to my heart. We all have a finite amount of time on the planet. Whenever I can, I want to be working on things that make a difference rather than just transactional things. I don’t work in a charity. I can’t see the difference my work makes right before my eyes. But my hope for these images is that somebody might see them one day, and it will plant a seed that might nudge them in a direction they weren’t already going in. I’ll probably never know the full impact or scale, or whether it makes a difference or not, but the hope for change means a lot to me – and things with purpose will always be what my heart wants to do. Q. What did the participants think about your photos? A. A big thing for me is making sure people are comfortable and like what I’m doing. There were moments when I would even hand the camera over to someone in their family and be like, ‘Do you want to have a go?’ Breaking down the idea that you’re the subject and I’m the photographer helps bring everyone into this equal playing field. I remember asking the person who commissioned me if the women would get a say on whether they liked the
16 FUJIFILM Focus Magazine
January/February 2026
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