about the photographer 

Photography found me before I found it.

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Long before I owned a real camera, I was making home movies — filming my friends wakeboarding and skiing at the dam, then hauling the footage home to cut together short films on my computer. I thought it was just a hobby. I didn't know yet that it was the beginning of something.

Eventually I saved up for a small point-and-shoot and took it everywhere. I'd spend hours editing the images afterward — this was long before Instagram, before filters did the work for you. If you wanted a photo to look good, you had to actually learn how to make it look good.

 

A few TV commercials, a modeling contract, and a one-way trip to Paris

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Around that time, a friend running a sports talent agency sent me to a casting on a whim. I booked the job — then a few more national TVCs followed. On the back of that, I signed with a modeling agency, and within weeks they'd placed me with an agency in Paris.

I could speak the language. I could not, however, work out the Metro. This was before smartphones, before Google Maps — I navigated the city with a small paper map book, the kind you'd fold back up wrong every single time. From Paris I moved between Milan, Hamburg, Berlin, and London for work, and through all of it, my little point-and-shoot came with me — quietly documenting the trip in the background of a career I didn't yet know I was building. Looking back, I was standing in the same rooms and on the same sets as models who'd go on to become genuinely famous, with absolutely no idea at the time.

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A detour through acting and a first taste of New York

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That same restlessness pulled me toward acting. I ended up at a six-week summer program at the William Esper Studio in New York. While I was there, I started wandering the city with a camera, just shooting what I saw. That's when photography stopped being a hobby and started being something else.

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Turning a passion into a living — and being wrong about the risk

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Back in Cape Town, I needed a way to support myself between acting jobs, and photography seemed like a better option than bartending. I was genuinely worried that turning a hobby into an income would kill the joy of it. It was 2010. I was wrong — it did the opposite. I'm still learning, still chasing the next improvement, and I still feel like I've only scratched the surface.

I started out shooting everything: families, babies, weddings. Anything that came my way. Then one day, someone asked a simple question — "Will you take my headshots?" I'd just been learning flash photography, so I said sure, let's try some studio portraits. Looking back through the images afterward, I realised I'd already unknowingly shot headshots for a few actor friends. So I posted an ad on Facebook, just to see if anyone else needed the same thing.

That ad became a career.

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Looking forward to working with you.

Justin