Dominique's Letter of Intent

January (typically something of a more relaxed wind-down point for us before gently floating down into a new wedding season) has this year launched like an absolute rocket. With February set to follow in much the same orbit I can only hope the rocket in question is a reusable model with precision landing capabilities. Currently the flight plan includes writing two new presentations for real-life conferences (remember those?) in Dublin and Barcelona, shooting some weddings, preparing a new website for launch, reviewing last year’s work, getting the studio back in order after a government-enforced hiatus and some exciting yet challenging projects that are already underway. So with the voyage exciting but boosters already preparing to jettison my first instinct about discussions of getting Kage creating again was “Houston we have a problem.”

I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge though and I’m thrilled that we are “getting the band back together” after one of the strangest spells in international living memory. And with no rules set to this particular Kage project I’ve decided that the best solution to force me to be more creative with less time is to take a slightly different approach to things.

The black-hole that consumes much of my time in photography (and yes there is still always enough time to torture a metaphor) is the development stage. Selecting and processing images is far from where my passions lie so for this project I’ve decided to remove that particular obstacle and give myself permission to just shoot by only using my Instax Mini 90. I love that the instancy of the self-printing camera means I can’t over-think it - there’s no possibility of rescuing an image in the edit, not even the leniency of developing the film to my own tastes. It’s just my eye to the camera - my world through a tiny window.

To paraphrase Bowie “I hope my spaceship knows which way to go.”

Dominique Shaw
January 30th, 2022

DEFINITION 015 | WORKAHOLIC

BY DOMINIQUE SHAW

Since I started my studio at the tender age of 21 I don’t think I’ve ever gone more than 6-8 weeks without shooting a wedding.

Oddly enough, before the world turned upside down and inside out (well, inside inside really I suppose), I had actually planned to do just that - after what was due to be a hectic March of travel, speaking engagements and weddings my diary had been cleared throughout April and early May to take some time to do something I haven’t done for a long time - spend some time at home and in the garden just trying to relax a little. That said, committed to that stay at home goal though I was, I really didn’t expect it to be legally enforced.

So, after taking my first legally required holiday from weddings how do I feel? Well it turns out I really love my job! My “break” from weddings has so far involved not only completing the edits of the last couple of weddings that took place just before lockdown but then (prompted by a little project set by Fujifilm having become an official X-Photographer back in January) I found myself actively going back through all of my past weddings and seeking out images that had been forgotten or undervalued at the time they were taken - something that’s actually been quite an enriching experience and that I would never normally find the time to do. I’ve shared a few of my favourites here.

I did take some time out yesterday though to watch a movie and prove to myself that I can totally do this no-work relaxing thing! I mean the movie was terrible.… like really, really terrible, but I persevered and watched it nonetheless! Seriously: unrelentingly awful - I’m pretty sure I was actively less creative by the end of it … it was one of those movies where you wish you were watching it on good old fashioned terrestrial TV so that you get to experience the sweet release of a commercial break advertising incredibly exotic, bucket-list locations like Morrisons or discussing the new world currency now being manufactured by Andrex … I digress …

So really what this lockdown has taught me so far is that if I’m ever going to truly switch off from everything and not think about my work at all I may need to get myself incarcerated for a major crime or something … come to think of it hunting down whoever produced last night’s movie might be a good starting point if only I could leave the house …

I might as well face it,

I’m Dominique and I’m a workaholic.

DEFINITION 007 | EQUANIMITY /

BY DOMINIQUE SHAW

The months of February and March have long been scheduled loosely in the diary as relative down time - a period of comparative relaxation and reflection, a time to refresh body and mind after an intense wedding season, consider where to take my work next and come back ready to do it all over again better than I ever have before.

This downtime has in fact been an annually recurring fixture in the diary year after year and has, at the more stressful of times, served as the light at the end of the tunnel; only by now such has been the predictable unpredictability of our schedule that this period has gained its own seasonal nickname amongst our small family unit: “The Era Of Good Intent.”

Suffice to say that any notion of down time has, once again, moved so far down the timeline of the day that it’s no longer even visible in the diary and right now the wedding season looks like an absolute oasis of calm in comparison. Don’t get me wrong - the presently frenetic nature of my life is all in pursuit of exciting causes, but never has quiet time thundered quite so deafeningly in my ears.

And so right now I find myself reflecting backwards instead of forwards to find that fleeting essence of tranquility; back to another frantic “period of relaxation” in which I somehow found myself in a New York apartment desperately collating a ‘body of’ my New York street photography ready to present to one of my photographic heroes, Alex Webb. The body of work in question so far was based around a day and a half of actually being in the city and maybe one image I might, at a push, be persuaded to actually show…

That New York trip was defined not by the familiar beating pressure of spiralling events though but by quite the opposite. What idle force possessed me to rise and wander solo through the streets of Brooklyn at 3am with an expensive camera in hand I’ll never know, but somehow, well before the crack of dawn one night, I found myself floating across the waters on the Staten Island Ferry, X-T1 in hand.

I don’t know how many hours passed on that boat but there I stayed, travelling back and forth as individual passengers got on and off to carry on whatever strange business might have brought them out at this unseen hour of the day: the creatures of the New York night. But there were no night terrors here, there was, strangely, only a curious sense of peace. 

With the New York skyline illuminated by the breaking dawn a beautiful quiet and stillness came over that boat. Right there in that moment without a single distraction in my mind I somehow gained more of an understanding with my camera that I hadn’t felt before and an unspoken connection to these total strangers that became integral to how I have approached all of my subsequent work. 

For those brief hours, in a sea of upturned good intent, I found equanimity. And when the frantic buzz of everyday life echoes all too loud in the ears the photographs I took that day serve as my place of solace.