AGE: 34 (both)
RESIDE: New York City
BEST LESSON LEARNED: “In a high pressure situation, the tendency is to blindly fire off frames with little or no thought given to camera settings, composition or the activity of the subject.
Over the years and after lots of mistakes, we have learned to control the urge to press down the shutter and hope for the best.”
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Now married 12 years, Jason and Rebecca Walker (no relation to this writer) studied photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design, graduating in 2005. They relocated to New York where Rebecca interned with Magnum, working with Bruce Davidson. Jason started assisting and has worked off and on for Annie Leibovitz, among other top portrait and fashion photographers.
“These and other experiences are significant in our continual development as wedding photographers,” Jason says in an e-mail. But he adds that being married to another photographer “has proven to be the greatest catalyst for artistic development. We are each other’s biggest fan and strongest critic.” They bring a classical, formal style to their wedding work, along with a gentle sense of irony and fun that attracts the more reserved among New York’s high-end clients.
“Our esthetic is innate and yet continually shaped by our shared history of experience in photography and the arts. We generally put people at ease, which allows greater intimacy and happiness to come through in the photos,” Jason explains. They are non-interventionist when it comes to technique, shooting with available light as much as possible and shying away from all post-production special effects and “gimmicks,” Jason says. “We try to minimize our creative instructions and let people naturally interact with their environment and each other.” And they have one inviolable rule: “We never ever shoot on a diagonal,” Jason says. He goes on to admit, “We are dreadful at the business side of things,” so they have recently signed on as photographers with Ira Lippke Studios in New York. Lippke’s reputation, connections and buttoned-down operations have meant more work, more money and “less of the pre-post-production hassles,” Jason says.
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