Emma Tunbridge: Advertising Photographer & Director Interview | EIZO

In the first of a two-part series, London-based advertising photographer and director Emma Tunbridge talks to Mike Owen from EIZO UK on the compulsion to create, the responsibility of photographing children, and why human curiosity matters more than ever in an age of AI…

For Emma Tunbridge, photography and directing have never been simply about recording what is happening. They are a means of understanding people: the stories carried by a body, the fleeting energy of childhood, and the emotional currents that can transform a commercial brief into something recognisably human.

Her route into the medium was not straightforward. She began as an art student convinced that she would find security in graphic design, only to be told – bluntly – that she was not very good at it. Retreating into an almost deserted college darkroom, she discovered that a camera could do more than reproduce what stood in front of it. It could layer observation, meaning, time and memory.

That discovery eventually led to a career in advertising photography and directing, specialising in babies, children, families, healthcare and beauty, shooting stills and motion for agencies and brands including Pampers, Dove, Medela, WaterWipes and Boots. It also produced a working method founded on sensitivity: understanding the person in front of the lens, shaping a set around their needs and creating enough trust for an authentic response to emerge.

Yes. Somebody showed me the basic process, and shortly afterwards we went to France. I photographed gravestones and other things around Montmartre, then brought the film back and developed it. There was that magical feeling of having made something more than the thing I had originally seen.

The image had meaning because of the angle, the light and the other elements I had allowed into the frame. I experimented with photograms – laying plant stems and objects over photographic paper – and became fascinated by the idea of layering meaning. Slowly, I realised that being creative, and perhaps being an artist, did not have to mean drawing.

At the same time, I was already collecting magazines such as The Face. I began looking at their fashion photography differently. It was no longer just something I admired; it became a possible life.

The tutors were fine artists, and the course was heavily weighted towards theory. They wanted us to understand process, meaning and the context of the artists around us. I still had this very practical voice saying: fashion photography is a job; people are paid to make pictures for magazines; let’s do that.

In my second year, a working fashion photographer came in to review our work. I was overwhelmed with excitement and talked at enormous speed about everything I wanted to do. He looked at me and said, in effect, “You are never going to be a fashion photographer. Slow down.” I was devastated.

He saw me leaving in tears and, at the end of the day, found me, apologised and arranged work experience. I ended up on Primrose Hill assisting on a Harper’s shoot with Sienna Miller, Matthew Williamson, Erin O’Connor and a hillside full of models, all in torrential rain. I stood there holding a reflector and thought: yes, this is everything I had hoped it would be and more.

That credit led to further placements, including work with Nadav Kander amongst others. I threw myself into professional experience because the degree was not going to provide the commercial education I wanted. By graduation I had built up enough assisting experience to become a studio assistant and work with photographers.

I began assisting in earnest around 2006, just as medium-format digital cameras were moving towards mainstream professional use, although they still cost between £20,000 and £40,000. I was good with computers and joined a wet-hire service, going out with the camera and computer system and helping established photographers translate their analogue look into a digital workflow.

Those cameras had many quirks: they had to remain connected, they crashed, and they behaved in very particular ways. Because I used them every day, I knew them intimately. I was retouching too.

The great advantage was that I did not assist only one photographer. I worked with an enormous range of people, usually on large advertising, fashion or film shoots, as well as with the still-life photographer who owned the hire company. It gave me a broad field of experience from which to decide what interested me.

Completely. I had seen so much that I wanted to try everything: still life, fashion, beauty. I didn’t know what to pick or where to start. I tried to go back to the basics – bodies, form and texture. For a couple of years my testing was very scattergun.

Looking back, a line was beginning to emerge. My interest in tone, form, shape and detail began to collide with my fashion work, weaving its way towards beauty and a focus on skin. Single shoots started to group into a larger typological study of the body. I was fascinated by the elements we shared and the ones that differentiated us.

But I struggled to present and talk about that work because I could not articulate a coherent emotional narrative around it. It was a study but not a story, and I didn’t feel it carried any meaning. One day somebody asked me to photograph their baby. I had never thought of babies as a subject in their own right, so, curious, I said yes. Suddenly the idea of childhood gave me a vehicle through which all those interests could be expressed. I could speak about the feelings, memories, emotion and meaning of the work in a way I had not managed before. That shoot was a turning point, leading to the work I do today. I quickly realised that I had more to say than I was able to in private family and newborn sessions, so I moved into working solely on advertising and commercial projects for agencies and brands, where I could tell stories in all their complexity.

You need to communicate at the child’s developmental level and understand what may make them respond in a particular way. We introduce play so it does not feel like work, and make the set accessible to them. Working on set can be very overstimulating. New sights, sounds and the flashing lights can lead to kids and babies feeling overwhelmed.

I work with my team to make changes on set to help with this. We tend not to have music on so the children can hear instructions a bit better. Only one person will be speaking to them and the rest of the team will try to keep chat to a minimum. Studios tend to be quite cold and newborn babies in particular are quite sensitive to this, so we will often closely monitor the temperature, use a smaller studio and warm new clothes on a radiator before we put them on to ease transitions. There are so many small adjustments we can make in language too, reframing a negative request for a model ‘not to put their hands in their pockets’ as a positive request to ‘put your hands on your hips’. All these small things add up to an easier experience.

Sensitivity on our set isn’t abstract. It’s in the practical decisions I make in the room: how many instructions are being given, whether a child understands the game, and whether they feel in control. The same applies to adults, and I work with so many who have never modelled before. The whole set is built around the welfare of the people on it, whether that’s a newborn, a child or an adult, because that’s what allows real interactions to happen.

We automatically assume that everyone experiences life the same way we do, but we simply don’t. We are all sensitive to different elements of it. It’s also why I care so much about showing all kinds of families – different cultures, bodies, abilities, identities and family structures – thoughtfully, and never as tokenism. I want my daughter to see a world through our visual language that is representative of the world I want for her: inclusive and invested in celebrating and protecting difference, and not constantly striving for attainment or perfection.

I am not sure it has fundamentally changed how I work with children. It has certainly added a new level of respect for everyone who juggles the needs of a family alongside their working life, and made me more resilient. Parenthood happened for me just before we locked down for COVID. My reality changed not once but twice in a very short space of time. It’s made the changes happening in our industry now easier to face. Being able to be flexible whilst still holding on to core values and ideas is so key to being an artist.

What motherhood did open up were new narratives experienced in real time: breastfeeding, sleep deprivation, weaning, teething and, fast forward to now, the stage when children lose their milk teeth and look like wonderful little gargoyles. You observe their energy and development from inside the experience, and then want to explore those stories in the wider world in both motion and stills. My personal work looks at these experiences as something we go through together, because so many of them feel so isolating at the time. All of this feeds into my commercial work, helping me tell stories for brands like Medela and Pampers.

I find myself photographing my daughter constantly on the phone. Photographs are a way of saying: I caught that; I get to keep that second of time and make it last forever. It also serves as a form of visual note-taking, saving little fragments of childhood to use later in my work.

My daughter occasionally stands in for a shoot, although she has a low tolerance for it. Children respond differently to a parent because you are their safe place. She is very quick to tell me that something is uncomfortable or that she wants to stop, whereas she might tolerate more with somebody else. Good for her. That ability to articulate a boundary is exactly what you want to preserve.

For us, it creates the right balance, but we have worked in the industry for the last 20 years, so we have had time to work it out! We both entered the industry at roughly the same time and assisted for a long period. In our assisting days we were accustomed to learning the night before that we had a crazily early start the next day. Working for 15 days straight was normal, as was pinging around countries, or pinging around this one. 12-hour working days were the norm and nothing was unionised. Life has always been a constant stream of organising and then quickly reorganising. We learnt a long time ago that we would never have it any other way, and it helps us not to attach too much emotion to it.

Now a call sheet might arrive quite late in the evening with a 5am start for John the next day. If I am also working, we have to reshape the day and decide how childcare will function. We have built up a network of friends and family that make it possible. Without them, we couldn’t work this way. They are all hugely supportive, as is our seven-year-old. We involve her in a lot of what we do, and she has an understanding of why we do it.

The work also brings gifts. John may work away intensely for six months, but there can then be long periods when he is at home. Last summer we had six weeks of adventures together. We find balance in those pockets of time and find joy within the hard work. We are lucky to be working in an industry we both love.

I spend a long time working out what makes the idea function for the client and which emotions we’re trying to inspire in the viewer. The creative team may already have done considerable work to identify those emotions. My job is to determine how we convey them.

That is one of the great joys: the client says, “This is what we need to communicate,” and I return with the way we might find it. We can create scenarios, introduce a prop or walk a child or family through a piece of play that produces the response. Increasingly, I shoot the stills and direct the film from the same production, so the TV commercial, online films and social content all carry the same feeling.

On a recent Boots Hearingcare campaign shoot, the brief required a young girl to scowl and appear wonderfully huffy. We turned it into a performance: more huff, more anger, punch a pillow, give it a kick. The point was not to force her to work. It was to make the experience a game she could inhabit.

The photograph becomes convincing when the person is not simply demonstrating an instruction but feeling something within a safe, playful framework. That is where storytelling, psychology and craft meet. And often the best moments are the ones nobody planned, when people forget the camera is there: a look, a touch, the beautifully imperfect moments of real life.

Emma Tunbridge is a London-based advertising photographer and director working in stills and motion, specialising in babies, children, families and healthcare. See more of her work at www.emmatunbridge.com or on Instagram @emmatunbridge.

Read Part Two of this interview: Releasing late October 2026