When I first started paying attention to photography around Cape Town, I noticed something.
A lot of the photos looked different, but they felt the same.
The locations changed. The outfits changed. The people changed. But the feeling often didn’t. The images were polished and technically strong, but they didn’t always make me stop. They didn’t make me wonder what happened before the photo, or what might happen after it.
That became the thing I wanted to figure out.
How do you make someone feel something when they look at a photograph?
For me, the answer came from film.
I started imagining every photo as if it had been taken directly from a movie. Not as a posed image, but as one frozen moment from a much bigger story. A frame that makes you feel like something has just happened, or is about to. A glance that carries weight. A silence that says something. A scene that feels alive, even though it isn’t moving.
That changed the way I photographed people.
Instead of only asking whether a photo looked good, I started asking what it felt like.
Did it feel quiet? Heavy? Intimate? Hopeful? Unsettling? Honest?
If a photo could look beautiful and still say nothing, then beauty alone was never going to be enough for me.
One of the first shoots where I realised this approach genuinely worked was a forest shoot called Into the Flame.
I didn’t tell my subject to stand in a certain position or place her hands somewhere specific. I told her to imagine that she was walking through a burning forest.
That changed everything.
She wasn’t just posing anymore. She had something to see in her mind. Something to react to. Something to feel.
And because she felt something while we were shooting, the photographs carried that feeling too.
That was the moment it clicked for me.
The strongest images are not always the ones with the most perfect pose. They’re the ones where the person in the frame has something real to hold onto, even if that feeling only exists in their imagination for a few seconds.
Sometimes that comes from a real moment. Sometimes it comes from a memory, a prompt, or a scene I ask someone to step into. Either way, the goal is the same: to create an image that feels like more than a picture.
That’s why I care so much about light, environment, movement, and the moments between poses. They aren’t just details. They shape the atmosphere of the image. They give it softness, tension, stillness, warmth, or weight.
I still give direction when it’s needed. I still think carefully about composition, colour, and light. But I never want the process to feel stiff or overly controlled.
I’m not interested in forcing a perfect moment.
I’m interested in creating enough space for something honest to happen, then recognising it when it does.
Because the photos people return to are rarely just the technically perfect ones.
They’re the ones that bring something back.
A feeling. A person. A season of life. A version of themselves they may not have seen before.
That’s what I want my work to do.
I want my photographs to feel less like proof that something happened, and more like a piece of the moment itself.