I am a creative business communications consultant. I help companies, individuals, services and products be found, seen, remembered and understood, in whatever country they need to land. I advise on and project-manage advertising and communications projects of every scale, from a single brief to a large multi-market campaign. Thirty years of it, built on one habit. Learning to read what is actually in front of me.
I was sixteen when I learned to read a negative, and I have been doing versions of the same thing ever since. The place was called Brook-Tella, exhibition printers, one of the oldest photographic houses in Britain. We worked in darkrooms the size of aircraft hangars, enlargers running on rails, prints four strips deep and twenty feet across, bound for the Motor Show or a trade stand in Detroit.
In my first week a senior printer named John handed me one negative and told me to print it. Then again. Then again, all week, the same frame. By the second day I was ready to walk. He sat me down and said the thing that never left me. You still cannot read a negative. You do not yet see the exposure, the paper, what happens when you burn one corner and dodge another. You are not making copies. You are learning to see.
That is the whole trade. Learning to read the thing in front of you properly before you presume to change it.
I took it into a long career photographing buildings, super-prime interiors and architecture for designers, architects and private clients across London and wherever the brief sent me. Later came property data, then localisation, taking other people's stories and rebuilding them so a stranger on the other side of the world reads the same feeling you did. Same lesson, different paper. Then Bangkok, which was meant to be a stop and became the point of the whole thing.
I built One Create here. An agency first, then a magazine, ten editions in, the sort of passion project that quietly becomes a body of work. Somewhere in the middle of it I started writing seriously at night, and that has become its own thing, kept in its own room on purpose.
Let me say plainly what a life like this can make confusing, because I would rather you heard it from me. You may have found me as Buzz Langton, the name over One Create, the agency, the magazine, the consulting. My given name is Murray Russell Langton, Buzz to everyone who has ever worked with me, and for twenty years my photography carried that name. I also write fiction under another name, a separate room with a separate door. One person, several lives, run deliberately rather than accidentally.
Which turns out to be the exact problem I now solve for other people. Being read used to mean being read by a human, an art director or an editor. Now the first thing that reads you is often a machine, assembling a shortlist of names in a second, naming whoever it understands clearly enough to trust. Most good people are invisible to it, not because the work is weak but because the presence is scattered. My method starts where John started me. Read how you are seen now, honestly and in detail, then correct it one deliberate move at a time until the print says what you meant.
I have been reading negatives for forty years. The paper keeps changing. The craft does not.