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About
We came to this work from different places. Dena through photography, conversation, and the relationships she creates with people. Damian through film, voice, movement, and sound.
Studio Unscripted brings those different ways of seeing together. We look for the pieces that reveal something real about a person, a relationship, or a particular time in a family’s life.
01 / Dena Rafte
The photograph is only part of the story
I did not begin my career as a photographer. I spent much of my working life in accounting and technology. Photography came later and opened up an entirely different part of me.
Over time, I became less interested in simply making beautiful photographs and more interested in the people and relationships behind them.
After my mother died, the desire to preserve the voice and stories of the people we love became deeply personal. I had photographs of her. I had keepsakes. What I did not have enough of was her voice, her thoughts, and the little things that would have told me more about who she was and what it felt like to be with her.
The photograph tells you what someone looked like. It does not necessarily tell you who they were.
I wanted the connective tissue. I wanted the meaning between the photographs.
That realization became the foundation for Studio Unscripted.
02 / Damian Peyrot
The moments in between the moments
When I am filming someone, I am watching for the moments in between the moments. A glance. A nervous laugh. A hand reaching for another hand. The instant someone forgets the camera is there.
I am not looking for everything to be perfect. I am looking for something that feels real.
Dena and I approach stories from two different directions. She is deeply tuned into people and the emotional history of a family. She often uncovers connections I might not immediately see. I tend to think visually. I am thinking about how we can make someone else feel what we are hearing through a face, a gesture, a room, an old photograph, or the light coming through a window.
What matters to me is that ordinary details change in value with time. A voice, a laugh, a familiar expression may feel everyday now. Years later, they can become the very things a family most wants to experience again.
Working together, we often find something neither of us would have found completely on our own.
03
The story comes first
Neither of us works alone inside our own discipline. We listen together, look at the material together, and think about what the story needs.
Sometimes the most important piece is a photograph. Sometimes it is a sentence from an interview, a pause, a laugh, an old letter, a piece of handwriting, or something we never expected to find.
The job is to recognize what matters.
You bring us your life. We find the thread.