Ara Coutts

Ara Coutts is a Toronto-based fashion and advertising photographer and director. Her images feel soft, intimate and slightly imperfect, as though they are being remembered rather than simply photographed. Ara followed an unconventional path into photography. She taught herself the technical foundations through YouTube and CreativeLive, then refined her eye through mentorship with fashion photographers Vivienne and Tamas and Stephan Glathe. Equipment taught her how to make light; studying photographers, cinema and painting taught her how to see it. Her studio work begins with natural light, or what she calls “God’s light.” She studies how it wraps around a face, falls through a window and disappears into shadow, then recreates that honesty with artificial light.