Toby Young

Toby Young is a photographer and filmmaker whose work is grounded in observation, patience, and the details that reveal how a moment actually felt. His images move between documentary photography, personal memory, travel, portraiture, and the quieter fragments of everyday life—often finding meaning in scenes that could easily pass unnoticed.

While studying photojournalism at the University of Missouri, Toby developed an approach that treated photography as more than a collection of individual images. The program’s emphasis on still photography, motion, audio, editing, and long-form visual storytelling gave him room to explore how separate moments can become a larger narrative.

That instinct is especially clear in One Thousand Eight Hundred and Ninety-Six Miles West, his first long-form book project. Created while navigating life as both a student and a father living half a country away from his daughter, the work gathers the people, places, and moments that helped him remain grounded while moving between those two parts of his life.

Film photography has also become an important part of how Toby sees. His collections from Tokyo and England were created with a Mamiya 7II, using medium-format film to document aimless walks through Tokyo with his father and a return to the part of England where he had lived as a child. The photographs are less concerned with presenting complete travel guides than with preserving how memory, place, and family become intertwined.

His work has continued expanding into motion. Toby served as Director of Photography on the 2022 short film The Dead, his first major introduction to long-form video, and later collaborated again with director Zack Hohenstein on Grayson’s Yard. Together, those projects reflect his growing interest in using still and moving images as complementary forms of storytelling.

Toby and I initially connected through Instagram before meeting in person during the production of Post Sex Nachos’ “Holdin’ on to You” music video, where we both documented the project behind the scenes. I had admired his photography for years and honestly assumed he was far too good for us to ever become close friends. Instead, that production became the beginning of one of the most important creative friendships in my life.

After I moved to Columbia, Toby and I became incredibly close. We spent years taking photo walks, building personal projects, experimenting without needing an assignment, and staying awake through more sleepless nights than either of us could count while finishing our undergraduate degrees. Some days we created with a clear idea in mind; others began by walking until one of us noticed something worth stopping for.

Toby was also the person who truly pulled me into medium-format film. His patience with the format, attention to each frame, and belief in slowing down changed how I approached photography. The cameras were part of it, but the larger lesson was learning to look longer—to resist the urge to move immediately to the next image and trust that a photograph could reveal itself through time.

Our friendship has always been rooted in that exchange. We challenge one another, share ideas honestly, celebrate each other’s growth, and continue returning to photography as both a practice and a way of understanding our lives. Toby remains one of my closest creative friends and one of the people whose eye I trust most.

These photographs preserve our years in Columbia, the experiments, walks, productions, unfinished ideas, long conversations, and ordinary moments surrounding them. They document an artist whose strongest work is often built quietly—and a friendship that helped shape how I see.