We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gregory Philips. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gregory below.
Hi Gregory, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
The most meaningful project I have worked on almost didn’t happen at all.
Last year I reached out to a friend — a beginner model — about shooting together on Atlanta’s MARTA rail system. I had been photographing the transit stations for a while, drawn to the geometry of the tunnels, the platforms, and the quiet poetry of people in transit spaces. I knew the locations. What I didn’t know was whether she would say yes.
She almost didn’t. She questioned why I even wanted to shoot with her, doubted whether she was ready, whether she had what it took to show up in front of a camera and make something worth keeping. I told her I believed in what we could create together. So she got ready, we worked through the details of her look — a striking dark eye that turned out to be exactly right for the mood of those underground spaces — and we drove to the station.
What happened next is the part I find hardest to explain and easiest to remember. There was a synergy between us that I didn’t plan for and couldn’t have manufactured. She pushed ideas. I pushed back with my own. We fed off each other’s energy, built on each other’s instincts, and kept reaching for something better than the last frame. Two people who didn’t entirely know what they were doing, trusting each other completely, in a space that most people walk through without ever really seeing.
The images we made that day were published. But that isn’t why the project is meaningful to me.
It is meaningful because of what happened to her confidence between the moment she asked “why me?” and the moment she saw the results. It is meaningful because the friendship we were building showed up in the photographs in a way that no technical skill could have put there. And it is meaningful because it reminded me why I picked up a camera in the first place — not to take pictures of things, but to find the truth in people and moments that would otherwise go unseen.
That shoot on the MARTA platform is still the standard I hold everything else up against.
Gregory, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I was never supposed to be a photographer.
My background is in engineering. I was born in India, raised in Kuwait — including through the Iraqi invasion of 1990, when my family was evacuated back to India as the Gulf War unfolded around us — and I came to the United States in 2007 for graduate school. Like most people from my background and culture, I understood the world through a very specific lens: you pursue engineering, medicine, or business. Art is something you do in retirement, or when nothing else has worked out. That was the unspoken rule I had grown up with, and I had accepted it completely.
In the summer of 2017 everything changed.
I was working at a church in Atlanta, feeling a deep calling toward some form of creative ministry, when I experienced something I can only describe as a moment of divine direction. I felt God telling me I had an artistic gift — and that I needed to develop it, not for my own ambition, but to glorify Him. I sat with that for a long time. An engineer with no artistic background, no camera, no laptop, and no idea where to start. Photography kept coming to mind. I kept dismissing it. It kept coming back. I finally spent time in prayer and felt a genuine confirmation — and then came the moment that removed every last doubt.
A person I had never met, who knew nothing about me, felt compelled to give me a brand new Lumix GH4 camera and an Alienware laptop. He did it with reluctance — he told me he felt God had told him to, and so he did. Friends donated money toward the rest of what I needed. I received a professional camera setup through what I can only describe as miraculous provision. When God goes to that kind of trouble to put a camera in your hands, you pick it up.
That was the fall of 2017. I have been pursuing photography ever since — self-taught, learning every day, and driven by the same conviction that started it all: that there is something worth seeing in every person and every place, and that my job is to find it and make it visible.
What I Do
Gregory Philips Photography is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and I specialize in three areas that I care deeply about: professional headshots and personal branding photography, editorial and fine art photography, and model portfolio work.
For my professional clients — executives, entrepreneurs, real estate agents, attorneys, coaches, and business owners — I create headshots and personal branding imagery that shows people at their genuine best. Not a performance of professionalism, but an authentic image of who they actually are and what they bring to their work. I believe your photograph should look like you on your best day — confident, approachable, and real. Sessions are available on location across Atlanta, and I bring my full professional lighting setup to wherever you are. No studio visit required.
For my editorial and fine art work, I shoot with an eye shaped by a life lived across three countries and two very different cultural worlds. My most recognized body of work is a documentary series photographing Atlanta’s MARTA rail system — the platforms, tunnels, escalators, and the quiet human moments that happen in transit spaces most people never think to look at twice. That series has been published in international magazines including Moevir Magazine in Paris, and my work has been featured on PhotoVogue, the photography platform curated by the editors of Vogue Italia. I also create fine art prints available through my online shop — black and white architectural photography, urban landscapes, and nature work that I believe belongs on walls, not just on screens.
What Sets Me Apart
I am self-taught. I did not go to photography school. I did not have a mentor standing over my shoulder correcting my technique. Everything I know about light, composition, and the relationship between a photographer and a subject has been earned through curiosity, practice, failure, and the relentless pursuit of a better image than the one I made yesterday.
I also bring a perspective that is genuinely uncommon in this field. I see the world through the lens of someone who has lived through a war evacuation as a child, navigated three countries across three continents, crossed cultural worlds that rarely intersect, and arrived at photography not through ambition but through faith. That shapes how I see people. It shapes the questions I ask before a session, the way I create space for someone to be themselves in front of a camera, and the kinds of images I reach for when most photographers would stop at competent.
What I am most proud of is not a specific image or a publication credit. It is the moment when a subject who came in nervous and uncertain — who asked “why me?” before we even started — sees the results and understands for the first time that they were always worth photographing. That moment happens in my sessions regularly. It is the reason I do this work.
What I Want You to Know
I am on a journey. I am not claiming to be the most technically sophisticated photographer you will ever find or the most formally trained. What I am claiming is this: I will bring everything I have to your session. Every image I make — whether it is a headshot for your LinkedIn profile or a fine art print destined for a gallery wall — represents the best I am currently capable of, and I am always working to make that best better.
If you are a professional who needs imagery that works as hard as you do, I would love to create it with you.
If you are someone who has always believed you are not photogenic, I would like the opportunity to prove otherwise.
And if you are simply someone who loves beautiful photography of the city we both call home — Atlanta has never looked the way it looks through my lens, and I am only just beginning to show people what I see.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Oh my God.
That is the sound I live for as a photographer. The moment a model or a client looks at the back of my camera, sees what we just made together, and those three words come out — involuntarily, genuinely, with a kind of disbelief that no amount of encouragement beforehand could have produced — I laugh every single time. Not because it surprises me that the image is good. But because it surprises them that they are.
That is the most rewarding part of being a creative. Not the publication. Not the technical achievement. Not the finished print on a gallery wall. It is that exact moment of someone discovering something about themselves through a photograph that they genuinely did not know before we started.
I work with a lot of people who come to a session carrying doubt. Models who wonder why I chose them. Professionals who insist they are not photogenic. First-timers who ask — sometimes with a kind of quiet desperation — whether they can actually do this. Recently I worked with someone who had never modeled before. She asked me if she could try. We shot together and when she saw the images she could not stop saying she never thought she could look that beautiful. She kept coming back to it — this idea that the person in those photographs was her, and that she had never seen herself that way before.
That moment is why I pick up the camera.
I believe every person has a version of themselves that the right light, the right collaboration, and the right creative partnership can reveal. My job is not to manufacture something that isn’t there. My job is to find what is already there and make it visible — sometimes for the very first time. When that works, when someone sees themselves the way I saw them from behind the lens, nothing else in the creative process comes close.
The Oh my God is the whole point.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
Two things. And I say them not with frustration but with genuine hope that someone reading this will hear them and think differently.
The first is about the camera.
At some point in almost every photographer’s life, someone pays them what they intend as a compliment and it lands like a quiet insult. It usually sounds like this: “You must have a really good camera to take such good photos.”
I understand why people say it. They are trying to acknowledge something impressive and they reach for the most visible explanation. But what that sentence reveals is a fundamental misunderstanding of what photography actually is.
The camera is the last five percent. What produces a great photograph is years of studying light — how it falls, how it wraps, how it changes the feeling of a face or a room or a skyline in ways most people never consciously notice. It is the education in composition, in colour, in the geometry of a frame. It is the hours of practice, the thousands of images that taught you what not to do before you learned what to do. It is the investment in equipment beyond the camera body — the lenses, the lighting, the editing software, the hard drives, the subscriptions, the ongoing cost of staying current in a field that never stops evolving. And it is the human skill of reading a person or a scene and knowing not just how to photograph it technically but how to draw something true out of it.
When a potential client asks for free work in exchange for “exposure,” or questions why a professional photographer charges what they charge, what they are really saying — without knowing it — is that they believe the camera is doing the work. It is not. The photographer is. And like any skilled professional — any doctor, any lawyer, any engineer — a photographer deserves to be paid fairly for the expertise, the years of development, and the tools required to deliver work at a professional level.
If you have ever dismissed a creative’s rate as too high, I would gently ask you to reconsider what you think you are paying for. You are not renting time with a camera. You are accessing years of dedication that happened long before you walked into the room.
The second is about the like button.
This one is simpler and I think even more important.
We live in a world where the reach of a creative’s work is governed almost entirely by algorithms — invisible systems that decide, based on engagement signals, whether your photographs get shown to a hundred people or a hundred thousand. Every like, every share, every comment is not just a compliment. It is a vote that tells the algorithm this work is worth showing to more people.
Many of my friends and family tell me in person that my work is wonderful. And I am genuinely grateful for that. But private encouragement does not pay the bills and it does not build an audience. What builds an audience is public engagement — the simple act of pressing like, leaving a comment, or sharing a post with your own followers.
It costs nothing. It takes three seconds. And for a creative who is working hard to get their work in front of the clients and collectors and collaborators who need to see it, those three seconds from someone who genuinely loves what they do can change everything.
If you have a creative in your life whose work you believe in — a photographer, a painter, a musician, a writer — the single most powerful thing you can do to support them costs you nothing but a moment of your time. Show up for them where it actually counts. Like the post. Share the work. Leave the comment.
Tell the algorithm what you already know.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.gregoryphilipsphotography.com
- Instagram: @gregoryphilipsphotography
- Linkedin: @gregoryphilipsphotography
