Ask Camila Urrea what her strongest quality is and she says perseverance. You don’t need to be born with it or discover it at a workshop. You need a year where everything falls over, and then you need to get up the next morning and keep working. Most of us think we’ve got it. Camila has been tested on it.
Thirty-five weddings in the calendar going into 2020. Then there were none. Camila Urrea calls 2020 the year of absence. Yet in the same twelve months she was named one of thirty rising stars in wedding photography worldwide. An empty calendar and a career climbing, at the same time.
That’s one of a lot of reasons we wanted her in Paris, as 2020 is not the only year that tested her.
How she came to us
We half-jokingly say we have our WUN-whisperers, the people who know this community better than we do because they live inside it, and when we’re building a lineup we go to them and ask who they want to see. So we asked one person we trust more than most, and the first name that came back was Camila’s. Immediately we knew Camila and the WUN community needed to cross paths.
She’s from Guadalajara, she’s based in London, and she shoots across Europe and back home in Mexico. What you won’t know is how she got from one of those places to the next, because it’s her art that’s driven every move she’s made. That’s the magic in her story, and why we’re so excited for the guests coming to Paris to hear it.
Three times she backed herself
It started with a camera her parents gave her. She taught herself how it worked, started photographing friends and family, and it was the way they reacted to the pictures that hooked her. At 21 she walked out of university to shoot weddings, and she’ll still tell you that was the hardest thing she’s ever done, less because of the work than because of what it meant to leave behind everything expected of her. A camera in her hands, she says, always gave her a feeling of liberty, and of power. She was right about herself long before anyone else was.
Then in 2019 she moved to London, at the point where the press back home was calling her one of the best photographers in Mexico. She left when it was all working, which is the harder time to go, and she landed in one of the most competitive markets on earth with no clients, no network and nobody to vouch for her, and built it all again.
If you’ve been with Way Up North a while, this will sound familiar, because it’s two of the themes we’ve built whole events around. Copenhagen was Clean Slate, about stripping back what you’ve built so you can start something. Lisbon was Where Dreams Go To Die, about pushing out past where it’s comfortable. Camila had already lived both of them. Perseverance again.
Growing doesn’t always mean more, more, more. She hit 39 weddings in a year, which is a wild workload for anyone, let alone at the level she works at, so she decided to scale back. She’d been chasing the epic photo, she says, getting the shot and booking the next one, and it left the work, as she described it, flat and superficial. What turned it around was connecting with people before photographing anything, which sounds obvious but is nearly impossible when you’re shooting every weekend of the year. Discipline is as woven into her DNA as the perseverance.
Connecting with Camila
How many times have you watched someone talk about moving cities, or going out on your own, or raising your prices, and walked out with nothing you could actually use? Camila has answered that question again and again with her own career, and she can tell you where it hurt and what she’d do differently.
She’s also spent years giving it away. She ran into gatekeeping when she started, and she couldn’t bring herself to ask anyone for help, so she built an education platform for Spanish-speaking photographers covering the things nobody wants to teach. Pricing. Positioning. What your client experience is truly worth.
And let’s not forget the art, which is what we’re focusing on in Paris. She’ll change how you look at a scene. She doesn’t hunt for a beautiful location, she takes whatever ordinary thing is already in front of her, a parking meter, a white van, a red wall, and asks what it can give her. Her light comes from Impressionist painting, her structure from architecture, her sense of movement from fashion. She doesn’t pose anyone. She tells photographers to stop thinking in single images and start thinking in chapters, and she’ll tell you that trends feel safe right up until they take your voice away from you.
If that’s a lot to take in, lucky for you, Camila’s got your back. She’s not new to the stage, and you’re going to leave her presentation as rejuvenated as you are motivated.
See her in Paris
Paris is about the art, or The Sexy Stuff as we’ve called it, tongue in cheek. Camila has built this career the fast way and the slow way, in two countries, and she knows precisely what changed and when.
Her work, she says, isn’t about her. It’s about the love and the story. And she shoots with everything she has because she knows nothing lasts forever.
