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Hi! We are Diana Pappas and Tom Bland. Without photography we never would have met and here we are many years later as partners in work and life in our new studio.
We have created this newsletter for people who value our work and are interested in the artistic process behind our photography as well as the inspiration that drives our creative eye.
By subscribing to our newsletter, you’ll receive two thoughtful (and we hope, thought-provoking) posts per month. Our work in this space takes up a lot of our time and energy, in a good way! We’ve been doing these art drops for well over a year now and have found that our newsletter, Writing with Light, is a major catalyst to create new work, string together some worthy sentences, and push the envelope.
How it started…
For this, we need to switch to third-person.
Rewind to the year 2008 when a 28-year-old photographer named Tom Bland was living in London. He spent his time at his day job immersed in East London’s creative scene, listening to music, taking pictures along the way. Back then Flickr was the place to share and consume photography from all around the world, so Tom naturally spent his fair share of time on there.
An entire ocean away in Hoboken, NJ a 26-year-old photographer named Diana Pappas was also spending a lot of time on Flickr, obsessively taking pictures when she wasn’t working in the NY film industry. The combination of a background in Art History, a Nikon D80, seemingly generous memory cards, and supportive and inspiring friends made through Flickr coalesced into a photographic frenzy.
So can you guess what happened? Tom found Diana’s work and sent a message… A few days later Diana wrote back… A couple of days after that Tom wrote back… Flickr Mails led to emails, and the emails increased in length and frequency to the point where we were writing daily, shooting simultaneously, sharing our work and lives with each other. 11 months after that first e-mail Diana was waiting at International Arrivals in Newark, NJ for Tom to emerge from customs, his first time in the USA. A few years (and many trips across “the pond”) later, they were married.
Back to first-person!
It would be easy to sugarcoat this story and say life has been easy, creatively fulfilling and that we reached the ultimate heights of being photographers (whatever that is) but life really threw us a curveball. Diana’s Dad passed away 6 months after our wedding and with that loss and related grief, our creativity, artistic impulse and joie de vivre completely evaporated. It was a very difficult time with many challenges. The cameras often sat idle. Instagram arrived and for better or worse we didn’t meaningfully participate, so that ship sailed. We had no momentum.
A few years later we switched to Fujifilm mirrorless cameras and went on some trips to England and deeper into Europe to resuscitate our creativity. Diana discovered that she was and has always been a writer and could put meaningful words to our experiences that we paired with our photographs.
Around the time we were expecting a child, PappasBland was forged as a way of bringing our photography under one roof. If you’re not already aware, having a baby does not make the process of being a photographer any easier, there is less no time for creativity, for thinking, for daydreaming, for going on photowalks, for processing images, all things we took for granted in those early years of our photography when it would consume many hours and our full focus everyday. We could still print and ship our photographs though, and we at least became proficient at that even if our shutters weren’t pressed so often.
But that sweet thief of free time is now in school and time is back (just) on our side. We’re now firmly behind the lens again, reconnecting with our younger selves as photographers but going in new directions that we could never have foreseen.
We have recently moved to our new home and studio in the beautiful Berkshires of western Massachusetts and we honestly feel in the midst of a big shift, creatively speaking. New place, new space, new visuals, new mindset, it’s all happening for us now. And if you are reading this your timing is excellent because you’ll get some insight into this next phase and be able to follow along as we construct whatever it is that the future holds for us. Thanks for being here.
Diana & Tom
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