About the photographer

Hi, my name is Adam Gori. I’m a birth, family, and wedding photographer living with my family in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

I started taking pictures in the sixth grade with a Polaroid camera, and the wonder of watching an image appear on paper as if by magic has never left me. In junior high I found a Canonet rangefinder camera in the attic of our Portland, Oregon, home. I learned to develop film and make darkroom prints with it and continued to study photography and take pictures through high school. I originally majored in photojournalism in college, where I learned that I am no journalist, and finished with a degree in poetry and foreign languages. I dabbled again in photojournalism at a small-town newspaper in Georgia, where I alone enjoyed staffing the camera and the darkroom. I found myself, while out and about, taking pictures of friends and strangers and sending them the prints. There was something about the reciprocation of that experience that I loved and continue to love. I have settled on a style of photography that I think incorporates lyricism more than it does journalism. As a portrait photographer my greatest influences are Henri Cartier-Bresson for the lyricism of his vision and his insistence on respecting the light, and Paul Strand for his craft and humanism.

I love photographing births and families. I believe that the moments surrounding birth, which hold so much elusive emotional richness, often are lost to the swirl of the moment, and I am extremely proud to be a part of such moving experiences. I do a mixture of candid shots and posed portraits--the candids capturing expressions and moments that just can’t be posed, and the posed portraits conveying a formal clarity that is just stunning as well as giving us time to set some shots up that are creative and sometimes just plain fun.

I still use film, mainly because I love the tones in black and white film prints, but also because I love the physicality of film—I like handling film, and I value having a physical archive of the pictures in the form of negatives. I photograph with classic 35-mm and medium-format film cameras from the heyday of black-and-white film photography. They’re small lovely cameras, and they’re quiet, and I think that goes a long way to making the whole photographic experience enjoyable. I must admit I’m watching the development of mirrorless digital cameras with curiosity and anticipation. But as of yet, I don’t feel that digital can surpass the qualities that I love about film and the lenses and cameras I use.

When I’m not behind the camera, I’m spending time with my wife and 2-year-old son in our garden or on a kayak. Should I admit this? I hate to cook. Okay, I said it. (I fear my wife thinks it’s a character flaw.) And then I’m back behind the camera again, pursuing long-term photographic projects that result in exhibitions. Currently I’m photographing landscapes in Orange, Durham, and Chatham counties associated with the history of the Reconstruction period.