When Avery Residential approached me to shoot their feature for Gay London Life, the brief was simple enough on the surface – portraits of Thomas Avery, Managing Director of one of London’s more culturally switched-on property agencies. What made it interesting was the context. This wasn’t a standard corporate headshot job. It was a full editorial feature for an LGBTQI+ publication and the images needed to carry that.
Thomas is a compelling subject. He has 20-plus years in London property and he talks about the city the way you’d want anyone talking about it – not in terms of yield and square footage, but in terms of belonging, visibility and what it actually means to make a life somewhere. The editorial angle, nightlife as infrastructure, the dispersal of queer London beyond its traditional postcodes, gave me something real to work with visually.
We shot across a couple of locations within the Barbican estate that felt embedded in the city rather than polished away from it. The Barbican sits in that strange London sweet spot – brutalist, beautiful, completely its own thing – and it gave the cover image exactly the kind of architectural feel I wanted for Thomas. The secondary locations leaned into the texture, something a little more classical, water and stone, which suited the quieter, more reflective shots that ran across the feature spread.
Thomas was great to work with – relaxed, up for trying things and good company throughout. We spent a genuinely enjoyable afternoon wandering the estate, working the light as it shifted and the conversation never really stopped. That kind of ease in a subject makes a real difference; the camera picks it up.
With editorial portrait work, my aim is always to find the image that feels like a person rather than a performance. Thomas is someone who clearly thinks carefully about how people experience the city and I wanted that quality to come through – present, considered, at ease in the space rather than posed against it.
The feature ran as a cover and four-page cover story in Issue 53, April 2026. You can read it in full at gaylondonlife.co.uk.
📷 ©️ Chris Jepson Photography
