STUDIO ET ALIA
(Issha Marie Photography)
2001 Wall Street
Vancouver, BC V5L5E4
Issha Marie graduated with an Honours Bachelor Degree in Visual Studies (Contemporary Art & Practices) and English Literature from the University of Toronto in 2007. She took a few years after graduation to make a big move from Toronto to Vancouver (where she now resides), and to refine her artistic practices in both photography and printmaking (specifically intaglio) before applying to several Masters of Fine Arts programs in and around Canada. Forced to re-evaluate her career path when she received rejection letters from all her choice schools in 2011, she was approached by a previous employer to help with the rebranding of her retail tea company. Issha insisted on using in-house photography for the brand instead of generic stock photographs, so she—inadvertently—became the company's official food and product photographer during her contract.
Issha put this rebranding project and the photos she had taken for this company into her portfolio when she re-launched her first commercial website in 2012, under the moniker 'Flattened to Fit Paper'. This caught the eye of small food-based businesses in Vancouver, as well as a burgeoning creative agency in Vancouver, and during the years between 2012 and 2015, Issha was being hired to make photographs for various restaurants and catering companies in the city.
In 2015, she started a creative partnership with her best friend, Alison Page, to form 'Page + Paper'. This partnership marked a distinct shift in Issha's practices, wanting to rebel against oft-seen-and-referenced images on Pinterest and Instagram. Issha was tired of recreating the same overly-Pinned images for clients. She wanted to create a language that paid respectful homage to the industry greats she admired—past and present—and merging her love of contemporary art with it. Issha and Alison caught their first big break as a duo when they were asked to photograph Araxi Restaurant's second cookbook. Both ladies were insistent they bring in the emotive and textural ceramics of Vancouver-based potter, Janaki Larsen, instead of using the restaurant's glossy-white plates. Referencing the way the NOMA cookbook was conceptualized, Issha and Alison really wanted Araxi's dishes to speak of the beautiful land from which the ingredients are grown. Then-Araxi head chef, James Walt, was thrilled with Page + Paper's ideas. The photographs from this book won the ladies their very first Applied Arts Award in 2016. The book also won design awards in 2016, with Jess Sullivan of Figure1 Publishing leading the cookbook's design helm. Page + Paper then went on to do work for Western Living Magazine, Vancouver Magazine, and The Alchemist, as well as making images for several Vancouver restaurants and local, luxury-and-lifestyle-forward product makers during their 4-year tenure.
Issha and Alison eventually dissolved their joint practice in 2019 to pursue different avenues in their photography practices. Currently, Issha runs her practice in a live-work studio in Hastings-Sunrise in Vancouver. She has expanded her practice to include beauty and product editorials on top of her food photography services. Once in a while, she builds floral installs in and around the city with her closest florist-collaborators. Issha has also since won another Applied Arts Award—her first as a solo photographer—for the food photography she has done for Vancouver-based restaurant, And & Chi. Her photographs have also appeared in a few issues of Best Health Magazine, run under the Reader's Digest umbrella.
Issha has also released multiple self-directed and self-published projects, the most recent one under the moniker 'One of Us Collective', with both Alison Page and Sophia Ahamed of Monograph & Co. She is currently writing and photographing her own cookbook too—the concept which she keeps close to her chest in the interim—and is in search of a book agent.