The Return of the Real in Brand Imagery

Not so long ago, every photograph from a brand looked as though it had been taken in a room no one lived in. Curtains swooshed to perfection. Fruit bowls arranged by someone with tweezers (usually me). Even the shadows were edited, as if they might distract from the point.

I used to spend hours styling beds for shoots. Ironing, steaming, spraying, tucking, taping. Every corner was coaxed into stillness, every fold smoothed within an inch of its life. The goal was to make it look as though no one had ever slept there. Which, of course, they hadn’t.

Everything was sharp, clean, retouched until it felt just slightly removed from the world.

Now, something quieter has begun to take its place.

When writing this, I immediately thought of Emma Croman. She has that rare ability to capture the real and the unpolished, without ever making it feel accidental. Like this beautiful shot for The Suffolk Rectory - quiet, lived-in, and full of presence.

You notice it in the way light is left to fall as it is. In a table that hasn’t been cleared completely. In a hallway with shoes still in it. Photographs are no longer trying to prove anything. Instead, they are offering a kind of presence. A room you might actually walk into. A product you might live alongside, rather than admire from a distance.

Grain has returned too. Once edited out without question, it is now left in, or even added back. Some of this is stylistic, but much of it feels like a response. A quiet pushback against the hyper-clean, high-gloss visuals we have been surrounded by. Especially now, when AI can generate flawless imagery in seconds. The more seamless things become, the more we seem to crave texture. Photographs that show their seams. Details that feel a little less controlled.

We are not heading back to anything, exactly. The shift is not nostalgic. It is more a loosening. A softening of intent. A willingness to let some things be. This is not laziness. In many ways, it asks more of the photographer. More noticing. More stillness. A kind of light-handedness that is harder to do than it looks.

It also asks something of the brand. To trust that presence is enough. That we do not need to clean every image into silence. That beauty can live in the corners, and sometimes in the dust.

Perfection, after all, is not the point. Believability is.