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–most days I work as a homeless youth advocate, sometimes I teach, occasionally I mentor. I lived as a Zen monk for a while. 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!
