Behind the Lens

There’s a specific kind of quiet that happens in a room when a storyteller has everyone. Not silence — the room is still breathing, still shifting, still reacting — but everything narrows to one voice, one body, one thread being pulled. That’s what I was photographing the evening Priya Malik performed in Toronto.

Priya Malik is an Indian actress, poet, and storyteller — someone who has spent a career translating interior life into spoken form. Her Toronto show was an intimate evening of that: poetry, narrative, and the kind of performance that doesn’t need spectacle because the words do all the work. The set design was striking — bright red doors, brick archways, spotlights that turned everything on stage into something cinematic. My job was to get out of the way of that and let the frames find themselves.

Event photography in a performance space presents a particular challenge: the light is designed for the audience, not the camera. Stage lighting is often harsh, directional, and high-contrast — which sounds difficult, but when you work with it rather than against it, it becomes your collaborator. The spotlights on Priya against the dark of the wings and the warm stage set created frames with graphic weight I couldn’t have planned. I shot at wider apertures to preserve that atmosphere, letting the shadows be shadows.

What I was most interested in wasn’t just the performer — it was the relationship between performer and space. The red doors, the lectern, the roses at the foot of the stage. The shadow cast hard against the door panels. These weren’t incidental — they were compositional elements as much as any person in the frame.

The audience is half the story of any performance. Moving off the stage and into the room, the light shifts entirely — warm mixed ambients, faces partially lit, the kind of available light that has to be worked with carefully. What I look for in an audience frame is absorption: someone so inside what they’re hearing that their face has stopped managing itself. Those are the frames that make the event feel real to someone who wasn’t there.

The evening also featured another performer — a poet in a vivid red suit against that same red door backdrop, which created a striking graphic image where fabric and set nearly dissolved into one wash of colour. Photographing both within the same space showed how one environment holds completely different voices, different physicalities, different relationships to the space around them.

What makes a storytelling show worth photographing — and what makes the photographs worth keeping — is that the entire night is built around the act of paying attention. The performer pays attention to the language, to the room, to the thread. The audience pays attention to the performer. My job is to pay attention to all of it at once and find the frames where that attention is most visible.

Events like this — intimate, culturally specific, built around voice and presence rather than spectacle — are exactly the kind of work I want to be shooting more of. If you’re organizing a performance, literary event, or cultural evening in Toronto or the GTA, I’d love to be in the room.

Event Photography · Toronto & GTA

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