Hey,
I'm Andrew.
Andrew’s passion for photography is equal parts curiosity and community building. For me, images have always been a more useful toolkit for communication, and photography came with a nuanced new language that was as fascinating as it was intricate.
Art, unlike spoken dialogue, opened space for a conversation style that was so much more accepting for me to communicate all those things important - love and loss, aspirations, fears, and lighthouses.
My photography journey begun as solitary experience. I am an introvert. My early work focused on busy landscapes, providing me with a framework to understand those big ticket questions of “why”. Travel photography quickly allowed me to return home to loved ones with undeniable proof of self growth and discovery of self within the Australian Outback. By the time Leila came along and spurred him into photographing for her travel books, I had already developed a comprehensive travel portfolio.
After university, my work with Telstra took me to some of the most remote places of Australia. Each solitary trip was an exercise in time travel - pre broadband internet the remote parts of Australia existed in a time bubble, and now, so did I - because returning home meant facing a world that had moved on quickly without you. A community that soothed the ripple of my frequent leaving, needed to again make space for me.
From grass-roots
beginnings.
I took the passion for photographing people in movement to work as an events photographer. Weddings became a point of interest as I was driven to understand what it was that the host truly cherished. It always came down to community. My work was a success because it captured the sense of togetherness for my companies clients who often, on their weddings, feel particularly isolated in the crowd.
At the start of my relationship with Leila, I found myself providing back lighting in restaurants so she could photograph whatever dish she was having for a “quick review for the restaurant”. The food photography begun as a pebble given to the woman I loved - it was our very own language, and so when she said “we need to do a cookbook by the end of May” and it was January, I got up to set up the studio. We published the very first, written in English, book on Bosnian cuisine, back in 2017.
The Gear Journey
My very first camera was a Kodak DC-215 which was capable of 1MP photos. Unsurprisingly, I quickly outgrew the capabilities of this 1998 camera. Once funds allowed I was able to switch to Canon with the original 5D, which I quickly augmented with a 1D mk 3, and later with a 5D mk 3. I purchased a LOT of L glass. This setup lasted me for many, many years.
While I loved the Fuji-film X100S since 2013, and in particular the Fuji-film simulations, I truly shifted to Fuji-film in 2019. The Kyoto with Kids project meant I needed to make my entire kit lighter, as I was now forever travelling with a toddler in tow.
In December 2023 I purchased my first medium format camera, Fuji-film GFX 100 II. Wow, just wow. What an amazing piece of kit.