There's something about photographing someone in their own space that changes the energy of a session entirely. No unfamiliar studio, no borrowed backdrop, just a person in a place they know, and portraits that truly feel like them.
We met Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio— author, community worker, and one of the more celebrated voices in Canadian fiction right now— at her home near Trinity Bellwoods, which made for an easy, unhurried evening. We walked over, knocked on the door, and got to work. We always appreciate a shoot we can get to on foot.
Jennilee was warm and genuinely fun to be around from the start. She knew what she wanted from her portraits and she wasn't shy about it: she wanted to look authentically, undeniably herself. Her debut novel Reuniting with Strangers is so deeply rooted in the Filipino-Canadian experience (it's a Toronto Book Awards finalist and one of CBC Books' best fiction titles of 2023!) and the portraits needed to reflect that same sense of grounded identity. That kind of clarity from a subject makes our job straightforward in the best possible way.
We worked through her condo and the building's common areas using the natural light and everyday textures of the spaces around her. This allowed her portraits to feel lived-in and genuine, which is exactly what author portraits should be. These are the images she'll keep coming back to, the ones that show up in features and on book jackets and feel just as right years from now, as they do today.
That's always the goal with this kind of work: not to make someone look like a version of themselves, but to make them look and feel like exactly who they are, right now.
If you're an author, speaker, or creative looking for lifestyle portraits that actually feel like you, we’d love to connect :)
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