About

About

Hi! I’m Hogen Mark Cluney. In a professional sense, I’m a wedding photographer — though I try to think of myself as a friend who shows up to your wedding with a camera and spends the day being a quiet, sentimental wallflower.  I do other things, too–sometimes I teach, occasionally I mentor. I lived as a Zen monk for a while. Every once in a while I take photos that aren’t at weddings.  Most days, life is incredible. Some days I wish I had hair to pull out.  But every day is somehow beautiful, because it’s real.

For us to create incredible photos together — all I need is for you to be yourself — to be real.  That’s it. 

If we can lose the masks we usually wear and let go of the ideas we have about what wedding photography is “supposed to be” — we can make something beautiful and original. There’s beauty in everything, but there’s a different sort of timeless beauty in things that are authentic (not #authentic #beauthentic #liveathentic…the old version of the word). The late Robert Frank said “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.  I think that says what I’m wanting to express better than I can…I want to make photographs that make you feel something now, and again, and again every time you see them; photos that still matter in 40 years. In my experience, that sort of timeless beauty doesn’t come from great posing or the perfect location — it comes from paying attention to the singularity of life that’s happening in each moment.

That’s what I’m after: something timeless.  I can promise you the photographs we make together will be in pursuit of that.

See recent work on the blog!