We’re proud to share that Katie Julia is presenting in Paris. Fourteen years behind the camera, over ten of them mentoring other photographers, and a name that came to us from our own community. Here’s where she learned her eye, what she’s done with it, and why experience is the thing we keep coming back to with this line-up.

Work that still holds up in twenty years

Pull up a gallery you delivered in 2012, if you’ve been in the game that long. Be honest about it. The light, the grain, the colour, the way you cropped things that year because everyone was cropping them that way. Some of it has aged into something you’re still proud of and some of it is now a time stamp, and the difference between those two outcomes is the thing most of us never quite work out.

Katie Julia has spent fourteen years working it out. “I want the work to endure,” she says. “I want it to feel as relevant and emotionally resonant decades from now as it does today.” She’s watched looks that seemed groundbreaking turn into period pieces inside a few years, and she built her entire approach around not being caught by that. She shoots film, medium format and 35mm, and she started in 2012, before Instagram decided what a wedding photograph was supposed to look like.

Why her name came up

Experience is the thing we keep coming back to with this line-up. Forty minutes in front of three hundred working photographers is a lot to ask of someone who’s still finding their feet, and you’ve paid to be there, so the bar is simple: we want people who’ve done the work long enough to have something settled to say about it.

Katie has fourteen years behind the camera and over ten years mentoring other people through theirs. That’s the kind of voice we want Paris associated with.

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Her name came from you, by the way. We ask our community who they want to hear from, and the Paris space in our app is where a lot of that lands. Katie’s name kept coming back from the guests themselves. The more often we hear a name, the more obvious it becomes that we’d be fools to ignore it. Then we did our homework, and it took about five minutes to see why people were asking.

Drama school first, then painting

Three years at The Oxford School of Drama, learning character, subtext, and what a person does with their hands when nobody is talking to them. The camera arrived as a practical thing to do between auditions and then took over the whole plan.

The rest of her education is in paint. Art History at university, an art scholar at school, and she still paints today and sells original work alongside the photography. Her own line for all of it is “Renaissance in spirit, modern in expression.”

Put those together and you get how she talks about the job. “My style has always been rooted in feeling rather than formula.” And the one I keep thinking about: “The camera is just a tool. The eye is what matters most.”

Vogue, Tatler, Burberry, Valentino

She’s based in the Cotswolds and shoots across France, Italy, Switzerland, Bermuda and Saudi Arabia. Her pictures have run in Vogue, Tatler and Harper’s Bazaar, and Burberry and Valentino have commissioned her. She photographed Pixie Lott’s wedding to Oliver Cheshire at Ely Cathedral, the Schiaparelli one.

Ten years of mentoring

Her mentorship is called Iconic. One to one, by application, and small on purpose. Her alumni are photographers, planners, florists and makeup artists, and they come out of it talking about the same two things: what they charge, and whether they think of themselves as an artist or a supplier.

That second question is the one she’ll put to you in Paris. It’s also the one that decides whether anyone is still looking at your pictures in twenty years.

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