Hi, I'm MJ.

I moved from Seoul to Brisbane with a camera and not much else. The first two years I made photographs nobody saw. The work was already good. I just didn't know how to put it in front of anyone yet.

So I took a job on the Lune Croissanterie floor and stayed for four years. Saturday rushes, regulars, the specific way a stranger looks at a pastry before they decide. That floor taught me what a photograph is actually doing. It is not decoration. It is the first second someone decides whether to keep looking at you.

I shoot weddings, portraits, and brand stories the same way I learned to read those mornings. The picture has to look like the person. Not their best angle, not their nicest day. The person. If the portrait does not look like them, nothing else I make for them will work either.

I shoot mostly in black and white. Black and white because colour comes later, and because skin and fabric and the way someone holds their hands all become more honest when you take the colour out. I shoot on a 35mm prime in available light, with lights only when the room makes me. The grain is the room.

My favourite frames are usually the ones where the person forgets the camera is there. The hand on a shoulder. The half-second before a laugh. The veil moving by itself. Those are the pictures that look the same in fifty years.

Right now I'm shooting weddings, elopements, and editorial portrait work across Brisbane and on the road. I work alone. I reply to every email myself.