Daylight first.
If natural light can do it, we use natural light. Supplement only when the brief genuinely needs the supplement.
Studio · est. October 2014
Eight people,
Eight people,
two rooms,
one rule we keep.
Brivon is a small commercial photography studio — eight people on staff, two rooms (Brooklyn and Berlin), one in-house retoucher who has worked the entire archive since 2017. We work slower than the average rate card and we keep the same producer on a brand from first call to final delivery.
280 m²
GREENPOINT · NYC
4.6 m ceilings · N light
Chapter 01 · founding
2014 — a working group
2014 — a working group
of three people in
a borrowed loft.
The studio started in October 2014 as a working group of three — Mira Halden, Joon Park, and Tomas Brivón — sharing a 90-square-metre loft in Williamsburg that we had borrowed for the autumn from a friend who had gone to film a documentary in Patagonia. We took on twelve projects that first quarter and lost money on five of them. We kept going because the projects we were turning down were starting to ask twice.
The first studio rule we ever wrote down: never ship a frame we would not hang. — Mira Halden, founder
The name "Brivon" comes from Tomas Brivón's family — a small printing shop his grandparents ran in Lisbon in the 1950s. The shop is gone, but the discipline carried. The studio's house style — careful colour, considered light, paper-first thinking — is a direct inheritance from that shop, even though the work itself is contemporary.
The studio is privately held; we have never taken outside investment, never sold a percentage to an agency, and we expect to remain owner-operated for the foreseeable future. We are eight people. We intend to stay eight people.
03
ADC Awards · 2022 — 24
11
Cover stories · 2024
02
Type Directors Club · 2023
94%
Repeat-client rate
Principles
Six rules we
Six rules we
refuse to bend.
These are not aspirations — they are the constraints that have shaped every shoot we have produced. Most studios learn these the hard way after a few years. We wrote them down in 2015 and have not relaxed any of them since.
Colour-managed end-to-end.
From capture to print. ICC-profiled. Calibrated monitors. A real print proof for any campaign that lands on paper.
One producer per brand.
The same person from the first call to the final delivery. Continuity is the cheapest quality lever a studio has.
Retouching is editing.
Done in-house. Treated as part of the creative decision, never outsourced to a post house that has not seen the brief.
The third frame.
Almost always the one. We shoot enough of every setup to find it; we never settle on the first or the safest.
Never ship a frame we
would not hang.
The first rule we ever wrote down. We have killed projects in post that we could have shipped — and we have not regretted it.
Room 01 · Brooklyn
280 m² of
280 m² of
north light.
The Brooklyn room sits in a converted printers' building in Greenpoint, a five-minute walk from the G train. Four-and-a-half-metre ceilings, true north light, a working kitchen for food work, two pre-rigged grid points, and enough corner storage for three full backdrop libraries. The room is available to outside crews for ten weeks of the year — contact the studio if you would like to enquire.
- Address137 Banker Street, Brooklyn NY 11222
- HoursMon–Fri 0800–1900 · weekends by booking
- CapacityUp to 18 people on set
- Daylight4 north windows · 9.8 m run
- Power3 × 30A circuits · independent grip ring
Greenpoint · NYC
Room 02 · Berlin
140 m² of
140 m² of
south daylight.
The Berlin room opened in 2018 — a calmer, smaller space on a Mitte ground floor with south-facing windows that give us a warmer, slower light than Brooklyn. Polished concrete, exposed concrete columns, a single 3.6-metre roll-down, and a quiet street that we can close to traffic for outdoor stills. We use it primarily for editorial portraiture, product still life, and any project that benefits from the slower European pace.
- AddressBrunnenstraße 162, 10119 Berlin
- HoursMon–Fri 0900–1800 · evenings by booking
- CapacityUp to 10 people on set
- Daylight2 south windows · 5.4 m run
- QuirkBrunnenstraße closes weekly for the Sunday market
Mitte · Berlin
The team
Eight people.
Eight people.
You will work
with two.
The producer and the lead photographer assigned to your project are the two people you will speak to most. The retoucher, the studio manager, and the production assistant are visible through the pipeline but stay off the brand-side calls unless invited.
Mira Halden
Founder · Lead photographer
Joon Park
Partner · Director of work
Tomas Brivón
Founder · Director of production
Anya Stenmark
Senior producer · NYC
Eli Wender
Producer · Berlin
Rosa Linder
In-house retoucher · since 2017
Felix Vahl
Studio manager · NYC
Iris Tornsen
Production assistant
Hiring · 2026
Looking for a studio,
Looking for a studio,
or a job at one?
We are currently hiring a junior producer based in Berlin and a freelance digital tech for the Brooklyn room. Brand-side enquiries take ten to fourteen days for a reply; hiring enquiries take four to seven.