Let’s work together
I spent my career designing rooms.
A room is never designed around the furniture. It's designed around the person who lives in it; how they move through it, what it says about them before they've said anything. Portraits are the same problem. Almost nobody treats them that way.
So I don't start with a camera. I start with a brief: how you want to be read, who's on the other side of the image, and what you're dreading. Then I write back a direction inclusive of the room, the light, the styling logic, the whole thinking, and you see it before you ever stand in front of a lens.
That rules some things out. The gray backdrop. The angle from below. The version of you that looks like an institution instead of a person.
What it makes instead is a portrait built for where it's going to live, a profile, a stage, or a wall in your house. Deciding what belongs on a wall is what I did for a living long before I did this.
Founders, creators, and people with a point of view. Orlando, and wherever the work is.
Designed, not just photographed.
About Marilyn
Hi — I'm Marilyn.
Born in Jamaica, raised in the States, most of it in Boston, where the arts scene did most of my early education. I studied interior design in London, which taught me two things: how to build a room, and how much of the world I hadn't seen yet.
Twenty years in interior design followed. Two decades deciding how a space should feel before anyone walks into it, the light, the palette, what goes on the wall and why. That isn't a career I left behind for photography. It's how I see. It's the reason the work looks the way it does.
I don't photograph a place because it's beautiful. I photograph it because I can't stop reading it. Same with people.
The rest: my family, good wine, music always, and strong opinions about where the couch should go.
DESIGNED, NOT JUST PHOTOGRAPHED