A classic (pre-Tinder) New York City love story: Two aspiring artists meet at a bar in Williamsburg to watch the World Cup final in 2010, after being introduced by a mutual friend. They both have charming accents—he’s from Sydney and quit design school to pursue photography; she’s from Rome and left a career in advertising to do the same—and they both share a common goal to break out of photo assisting and shoot full time.
They hit it off, but this love story takes a turn: They realize they’ve just met one of their strongest adversaries in the most competitive photography market in the world. But this isn’t a Hollywood romcom with silly drama—Paola Ambrosi De Magistris and Murray Hall talk it out, start working together and become a successful travel photography duo under the moniker Paola + Murray.
A portrait from Colombia (left); Ingredients from Oxaca City (right). Photos © Paola + Murray.
“Making the decision to work together came along pretty organically: We fell in love with each other and each other’s work. We wanted to be together as much as possible and wanted to travel the world,” De Magistris explains. At the time, they were both shooting travel and reportage personal work and small assignments; their style was raw and needed work. “[Working] together made us finesse our style, our color and our technical skills to the point that clients started hiring us specifically to shoot portraits, food and travel stories.”
Early on, De Magistris and Hall took every assignment offered to them so that they could practice collaborating. They also considered adding fashion shoots to their portfolio, but ultimately decided to focus on travel. “We realized that staying true to ourselves and photographing what we really loved was key,” De Magistris says. “Once we [focused] on the work we loved…we got our first assignment for Condé Nast Traveler, which was our breakthrough into the professional photography world.”
Skiers in the Dolomites (left); A scene from Oaxaca City (right). Photos © Paola + Murray.
That assignment was commissioned by the magazine’s former photo editor, Jennifer Miller, who was introduced to their work by a mutual friend, consultant Nancy Jo Iacoi. The shoot took them to the Dolomites in Northeastern Italy and won them their coveted first magazine cover. Miller pushed their graphic sensibilities, De Magistris says. The body of work has a strong quality of light, sweeping over peaks and valleys, shaping hard shadows in the snow and casting a warm, inviting mood indoors.
The duo has since shot multiple cover stories for Condé Nast Traveler, and has also added clients such as Food & Wine, GQ and Virgin Australia Voyeur to their list, honing their multi-sensory approach that combines food, portraits and atmosphere to describe a location, and natural light and hard flash to create texture and mood. Their page on their rep’s website, Bernstein & Andriulli, says their work reveals “the beauty in the overlooked. They show us what we’re missing, what’s behind the postcard.”
Learn how Paola + Murray build their client list, manage their brand as a duo and read their advice to aspiring travel photographers in the full article found in the Fall edition of PDNedu, which you can read for free here.
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