Christopher Owens, Creative Director and Photographer, talks about Pattern a year on.

When we try to imagine what success looks like in our working lives, it’s hard not to conjure up imagery in our minds of online business gurus, CEO podcasts and influencers with immaculately manicured social media feeds. That’s understandable.

No matter how mindful we are of what content we allow into our sphere, there’s no accounting for what the algorithm will hoy up into our timelines at any given moment.

We all juggle our work alongside everyday life in a constant balancing act. If we can find happiness and fulfilment in either aspect, that’s worth chalking up as a personal win.

In creating Pattern a year ago, I hoped it could be a place to celebrate those wins and explore that intersection where work and life meet.

“Pattern as a platform has hopefully provided a place where someone fighting for fair working rights can stand alongside a CEO on an equal footing”

As a photographer who has captured many people from all sorts of walks in life, I’ve always been fascinated in people, personality and what drives them to do the things that they do. Whilst I carry out many assignments for clients as part of my practice - both commercially and editorially - I craved a space in which I could self-commission stories I wanted to tell and host features on the people I felt were doing fascinating things with their lives.

I wanted long form editorial reads and photographic studies on those who wouldn’t ordinarily get that detail of coverage on contracting mainstream media outlets.

By focusing on work in its broadest sense rather than ‘business’, Pattern as a platform has hopefully provided a place where someone fighting for fair working rights can stand alongside a CEO on an equal footing.

A year down the line from pressing ‘go’ on Pattern, and with the help of many contributors, I’ve been lucky enough to amass over 40 of these stories.

Pattern is a place where these stories can be shared with an independent voice outside of the static of social media. Whilst socials are harnessed to reach the largest viable audience with the pieces created for Pattern, social media is also often a place of brevity, anecdote, division and intellectual point scoring, with opinions already formed and divisions already drawn. This noise can be deeply unhelpful when we are telling our collective story of who we are, what we do, what we stand for and how we can work in unison to achieve it: our collective narrative.

Telling longer formed stories using art, the written word, moving image and photography is, in my opinion, the most powerful tool we have access to in allowing us to talk about the issues important to us.

Storytelling has the ability to make people feel something; it can touch you emotionally, make you laugh or cry, and help you come to a conclusion formed upon how you feel about a topic, rather than arriving with your mind made up. In stories and by identifying patterns, we perhaps have a way of seeing elements of ourselves or those we care about through the lens of someone else’s experiences.

I do believe we can determine our own version of success and what it means and looks like to us individually. It’s not dictated by the high performance lifestyle arbiters, it’s what you choose to make it.

Sure, aspirational imagery has a place, but it has to be attainable.

So, chalk up those personal wins and I hope Pattern can be a place to tell everyone about them.