Home Studios Are Where The Art Is

David Shoukry works from a purpose-built studio next to his house. Niall Hampton discovers how David creates his distinctive editorial portraiture

- David Shoukry

Among many other things, 2020 will be remembered as the year that working from home became the norm rather than the exception for a lot of people. But many photographers didn’t need to make this transition – whether photographing people, pets or plants, they’d been successfully running operations at home for years. So when life locked down, they were fully prepared and able to carry on as much as normal under the circumstances.

David Shoukry is one such photographer – based in Wiltshire, he specialises in portraiture of people working in the performance arts, including actors, models and musicians. This latter category is particularly close to David’s heart, as he’s a music graduate and former music teacher who swapped one of his passions for another – the pianoforte made way for photography, something that he had previously enjoyed as one of his hobbies.

This progression is not an unusual one: music is all maths after all, and it’s impossible to have a technical conversation about photography without having to reference strings of numbers and fractions.

And while so much of our enjoyment of music is derived from the interplay of tone, tempo and volume, the same is true of photography, with various elements coming together to form a given image.

In terms of composition and how he builds his sets around his subjects, David’s work calls to mind classical portraiture – and this distinct style is completed by how he uses colour. Keen to see how David makes his portraits sing, we arranged a socially distanced shoot at his home studio, and invited Bristol-based models Sophie Shah and Curtly to come and strike some poses.