James Hurren is a still life photographer based in Toronto, working across food, drink, and product. His images begin with atmosphere. A piece of food, a bottle, or a single object gets lit and arranged until the familiar starts to feel charged. He's drawn to the moment ordinary things take on emotional weight, and he builds toward it deliberately, treating each shoot as a kind of visual experiment.

That instinct comes from the landscape. Before the studio, James spent years photographing the Canadian Rockies, responding to whatever the light and weather put in front of him and carrying that mood from capture through to the final edit. In the studio the process runs in reverse. He imagines the scene first, then constructs it piece by piece, assembling lighting, colour, and composition into atmosphere. His current work lives in the tension between those two ways of working, where a setup is planned carefully but left open enough to evolve, and the mood is found as much as it's designed.

Cinema shapes the way he sees, particularly filmmakers like David Lynch and the way atmosphere can quietly change the meaning of an ordinary thing. James brings that same sensitivity to still life, working with colour, shadow, and an eye trained on analog optics alongside the precision of a digital workflow to make images that feel sensory and immersive rather than simply clean.

A recent Sheridan College graduate, James is available for commercial and editorial work, bringing a mood-driven, experimental perspective to food, drink, and product photography.