About ME
I CAME TO THIS THE LONG WAY ROUND
I'M BENJI
I photograph weddings for couples doing the day their way, and it took me about ten years longer than it should have to work out that this was the job.
WHY PHOTOGRAPHY?
I did a fashion degree, and the best thing it gave me was the company. I spent half my time around the fashion photographers, I lived with a photographer at uni, and somewhere in all of that I realised I was more interested in what they were doing than in what I was supposed to be doing.
The degree also taught me I never wanted to work in fashion.
An industry built entirely on polish turned out not to be my thing.
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So I left.
And then, because life is nothing if not funny, I spent the best part of a decade as a professional Tea Sommelier. That's a real job. I was good at it. My knowledge of tea remains a genuine liability at parties, and for ten years the camera sat there, patiently, like it knew something I didn't.
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It did. The first wedding I photographed rewired me, because nobody was performing and nobody wanted polish. It was a room full of people who love each other having the best day of the year, and my whole job was to stand in the right place while it happened. Everything I'd absorbed from years around photographers finally had somewhere honest to live.
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I went full time in 2019 and I've never looked at another career since. When couples ask why their photos feel like the day rather than a photoshoot, this is the honest answer: I spent ten years finding my way here.
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I'm not wasting a minute of it.
BENJI , BENJI, BENJI...
Where do we even begin?
You are bloody amazing!
Georgia & JAMIE
I'M BASED IN WESTERHAM, ON THE KENT & SURREY BORDER
Half an hour from central London in one direction, immediately surrounded by fields in the other. I genuinely couldn't have picked a better spot for this job if I'd planned it, and I absolutely didn't plan it.
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It means I spend one Saturday at a warehouse wedding in Hackney and the next in a tent on someone's farm, and I honestly couldn't tell you which I look forward to more. I've shot proper old barns, big houses, beaches, back gardens, a field with nothing in it but a generator and two hundred people going for it.
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Different buildings, same work. It was never the room that made the photographs.
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And when your wedding is further away, good. I've shot in Scotland, Canada, Cuba and Antigua so far, and the list wants adding to.
Distance is not a problem. Distance is a road trip.
WHEN I'M NOT AT WEDDINGS
I'm at a festival, or planning the next one. Incubus are my favourite band above everything, and most of the early-2000s Kerrang canon behind them. I've been standing in muddy fields in the pouring rain watching obscure bands for over twenty years now, and a worrying number of my couples know exactly why it's considered fun. More than one has walked down the aisle to a song I'd have picked myself.
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The rest of the year, my partner and I point the motorhome at Europe with no fixed plan and see what happens. It's the same instinct that makes me good at weddings: turn up, read the room, trust that the good stuff can't be scheduled. Sometimes the room is a vineyard in France. Sometimes it's a car park in Belgium. Both have their moments.
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I read graphic novels the way other people watch telly, and I will absolutely talk your ear off about them at your reception if you start me.
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I have a teenage daughter who assures me, with real conviction, that I am deeply uncool. I'd push back, but I'm a forty-something man with a festival wristband tan and strong opinions about a band from 2001, so the evidence is on her side.
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At home it's my partner, four dogs and... I promise this is true... a fox.
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The sofa situation is beyond saving.
