The Chicago Journal

Bonphotage on How Fine Art Film Photography Preserves Real Wedding Moments

The Chicago Journal Staff on May 15, 2026

By Matt Emma

Bonphotage, a Chicago-based luxury wedding and videography studio, operates by embracing a philosophy that takes most couples a moment to articulate and an entire lifetime to feel. There is a quality to a film photograph that no digital file has yet fully replicated. It lives in the grain and the way light pools and softens at the edges of the frame.

It is evident in the particular warmth that analog chemistry produces when it meets the specific light of a late afternoon ceremony. Film interprets the moment, and that interpretation carries an emotional resonance that tends to deepen rather than diminish over time.

Fine art film photography occupies a distinct and increasingly sought-after position within the luxury wedding market. As digital photography has matured into a technically flawless discipline, a countermovement presents itself among couples and photographers who believe flawlessness is not the same as feeling.

What Film Does That Digital Cannot

The conversation surrounding film versus digital in wedding photography is often framed as a matter of aesthetics. In truth, the distinction runs considerably deeper than visual style. Film photography is a discipline of commitment.

Every frame costs. There is money and time involved, and the consideration of a finite number of exposures available on a single roll. That cost changes the way a photographer sees.

Such discipline produces a fundamentally different kind of image, and the photographs that result are the product of vision and intention. A frame on film represents a considered creative decision, and couples who receive a curated gallery of film images are receiving the genuinely rare proof that someone was truly watching and invested in interpreting what was happening in front of the lens.

The medium has a unique relationship with light that digital sensors have historically struggled to match. Film responds to natural light with an organic warmth and gradation that flatter skin tones across a remarkably wide range of complexions and lighting conditions.

“There is a softness to film that makes people look like themselves at their most beautiful; not a filtered version of themselves, but the real thing, just seen more generously,” says Lynzie Hazan, founder of Bonphotage.

Authenticity and the Analog Moment

Fine art film photography and documentary storytelling share a natural affinity, and that affinity is not accidental. Both disciplines are grounded in the belief that the most powerful images are found rather than constructed. The job of the photographer is then to be sufficiently attentive and technically prepared to capture what is genuinely happening, as opposed to engineering a version of events that photographs well.

Documentary film photography at a wedding can function somewhat differently from its digital counterpart. Because each exposure is considered and deliberate, the photographer tends to move through a wedding day with a heightened sense of presence. There is no reviewing the back of the camera between moments.

The photographer must trust their preparation, their eye, and their read of the room, which tends to make them more attuned to the quiet, unscripted moments that define a wedding day far more honestly than any posed portrait.

“Film doesn’t editorialize the way heavily processed digital images sometimes can,” says Hazan. “It shows you what was there, the light, the feeling, the truth of a moment, without adding a layer of interpretation that pulls you out of the memory.”

The Heirloom Standard

There is a reason that the photographs most people hold onto across generations were almost universally shot on film. The medium does age beautifully. Color film develops a warmth and richness over decades that only deepens its emotional resonance, while black and white film achieves a timeless gravity that places its subjects outside of any particular era.

A wedding photograph shot on film in 2025 will likely look more compelling in 2055 than a heavily edited digital file from the same day, and this boils down to chemistry, not nostalgia.

The distinction matters because wedding photographs are among the very few objects a couple will own that were made specifically to outlast them and be passed to children, and perhaps to grandchildren, as evidence that something beautiful and real occurred. Film is equal to that responsibility in a way that few other photographic media are.

“We think about the couple opening a box of prints forty years from now,” says Hazan. “We want those images to stop them cold because they resonate and are true.”

Choosing a Photographer Who Understands the Medium

For couples drawn to fine art film photography, the selection process requires an additional layer of discernment. Not every photographer who offers film shooting has a genuine command of the medium.

Film demands a technical foundation that differs meaningfully from digital work, and couples should ask to see extensive film portfolios, inquire about which labs a photographer uses for development and scanning, and explore whether the photographer shoots film exclusively or integrates it with digital capture.

The integration question is worth examining carefully, as many photographers use film selectively while relying on digital for the faster-paced documentary work of a reception. That hybrid approach has genuine merit, particularly for couples who want the heirloom quality of film in certain images while maintaining comprehensive coverage of the full wedding day.

Fine art film photography is a philosophy, a commitment to presence, intention, and the belief that the most honest images of a wedding day are the ones made by someone who understood exactly what they were looking at when they pressed the shutter. For couples who want their wedding photographs to carry that kind of weight, the medium is worth seeking out.

Bonphotage is a Chicago-based luxury photography and cinematography studio founded in 2014 by Lynzie Hazan, a former international corporate attorney. Named among the top photographers in the world, the studio has documented over 1,000 weddings across more than 45 countries, with editorial work featured in Harper’s Bazaar, The Knot, and Women’s Wear Daily.

Richard Fallquist’s Great Works and Me Opens the Door to the Classics Without the Usual Pretension

The Chicago Journal Staff on May 15, 2026

By: Marita Murray

A lot of books about the Western canon carry themselves like guarded museums. You can practically hear the velvet rope sliding into place before you even finish the introduction. Great Works and Me takes the opposite approach. Richard Fallquist writes as if he genuinely wants ordinary people to feel welcome inside literature, music, painting, mythology, and philosophy instead of feeling threatened by them. That difference matters more than it sounds.

The book is built around a surprisingly simple observation. Most people are not avoiding the classics because they are lazy or incapable. They are avoiding them because somewhere along the way, culture became associated with embarrassment. People worry about reading the wrong translation, misunderstanding symbolism, listening to the “wrong” version of Beethoven, or exposing how little they know. Fallquist seems deeply aware of that insecurity, and instead of mocking it or flattening it into motivational slogans, he calmly works around it.

What makes the book effective is that it does not treat the canon like a sacred ranking system. Fallquist approaches great works as interconnected conversations stretching across centuries. A Greek myth bleeds into Renaissance painting. A novel echoes inside an opera. A symphony reshapes the emotional atmosphere of an era. He is constantly linking forms together in ways that feel intuitive rather than academic. The result is less like sitting through a lecture and more like walking through a city with someone pointing out hidden architectural details you would have otherwise missed.

Fallquist himself comes from an unusual background for this kind of project. After spending fifty years working as a consulting actuary, he turned toward cultural advocacy with the enthusiasm of someone rediscovering ideas that had quietly shaped his life all along. Oddly enough, that late career shift helps the book enormously. There is none of the professional critic’s territorial defensiveness here. He sounds like a person who learned these works because he loved them, not because he needed credentials attached to them.

The tone stays conversational throughout, sometimes almost wandering, but in a way that feels human rather than sloppy. Fallquist will move from literature to music to painting without warning, following thematic connections rather than a rigid academic structure. At times, the book feels like listening to an intelligent friend think out loud after dinner. Some readers looking for heavily footnoted criticism or dense historical analysis may find the framework too loose. Personally, I think that looseness is part of its charm. It lowers the psychological barrier that keeps so many people from engaging with the arts in the first place.

What I appreciated most was the absence of cultural snobbery. Fallquist repeatedly gives readers permission to begin imperfectly. He recommends accessible editions, recordings, museum resources, and entry points without making accessibility sound like an intellectual compromise. That generosity runs through the entire book. He understands that curiosity usually grows through invitation, not intimidation.

There is also something quietly moving about the project itself. A man who spends decades in a technical profession and later in life decides to advocate for literature, music, and art carries a message of intellectual renewal. The book never says this directly, but it lingers underneath every chapter. It is never too late to become a more attentive reader, listener, or observer.

By the end, Great Works and Me feels less like a syllabus and more like permission. Permission to approach the classics without fear of getting them wrong. Permission to wander slowly through culture instead of consuming it competitively. In a moment where so much discussion around art feels performative, Fallquist offers something refreshingly sincere.

Richard Fallquist’s Great Works and Me: Enhancing Your Life with Classics, Lit, Music, and Art explores how timeless works of culture can deepen everyday life and personal understanding. Readers can find the book on Amazon.

Barry Maher’s The Great Dick Crashes Literary Satire Into Occult Horror With Glorious Bad Intentions

The Chicago Journal Staff on May 15, 2026

By: MR Dowling

Some novels politely ask for your attention. The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon kicks open the door smelling like whiskey, grave dirt, bad decisions, and 3 a.m. regret. Barry Maher’s fiction debut is chaotic, vulgar, weirdly intelligent, occasionally unhinged, and far more emotionally aware than it first pretends to be. The book operates like somebody fed literary satire, supernatural horror, noir sleaze, and existential panic into a blender and decided not to put the lid on.

The opening alone tells you this thing has no interest in behaving normally. Maher begins with a Harvard professor in the late 1960s riffing on Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and the possibility of a modern American masterpiece titled The Great Dick. It sounds absurd because it is absurd. But buried underneath the joke is the novel’s entire nervous system. Maher is interested in ego, masculinity, self-invention, appetite, fraudulence, and the uniquely American habit of mistaking excess for identity.

Then the story jumps into 1982 Southern California, and things immediately start sweating through their shirt collars.

Steve Witowski is one of those protagonists who would probably smell terrible in real life but remain fascinating anyway. Failed songwriter. short-term criminal. Running from drug trouble. Permanently circling self destruction while still carrying just enough self awareness to recognize it happening. When he intervenes in a violent assault against a woman named Victoria, he accidentally drags himself into a collapsing universe involving occult rituals, desecrated graves, sex, paranoia, manipulative charisma, and eventually a demon that may or may not be feeding directly off everyone’s worst impulses.

What makes the novel work is that Maher never fully separates horror from comedy. The book is funny constantly, but not in a clean setup punchline way. More in the exhausted, morally compromised laughter that happens when people realize their lives have become grotesque beyond repair. Steve’s narration especially crackles with cynical desperation. He keeps trying to posture like a noir antihero while visibly unraveling underneath it.

The California setting matters enormously here. Maher captures a version of early 1980s Southern California that still feels spiritually trapped inside the wreckage of the Sixties. Everybody seems hungover from failed liberation fantasies. The bars, backrooms, crumbling church spaces, cheap apartments, washed out dreamers, aging rebels, and chemically damaged seekers all feel sticky with disappointment. There is rot underneath nearly every interaction.

And yet the novel is not nihilistic. That surprised me. For all its profanity, grotesque humor, and occult chaos, small moments of shame and tenderness keep surfacing unexpectedly. Steve is selfish, frightened, sexually reckless, and frequently pathetic, but Maher allows flickers of vulnerability to leak through the performance. Those glimpses keep the character from collapsing into parody.

The demon itself becomes increasingly fascinating because the novel refuses to make it purely external. There is a constant sense that everybody here is already carrying private forms of corruption long before the supernatural enters the picture. The horror works precisely because it amplifies emotional weaknesses already festering beneath the surface.

Stylistically, Maher writes with this wired late night momentum that feels perfect for the material. The prose barrels forward recklessly but still lands sharp observations when you least expect them. At times the book feels like Raymond Chandler wandering through a satanic panic fever dream after staying awake for four consecutive days.

Readers demanding realism, moral clarity, or narrative restraint will probably hate this novel on sight. Honestly, that almost feels like proof the book is doing something right. The Great Dick is deliberately abrasive, deliberately excessive, and fully aware of its own ugliness. But underneath all the demonic chaos and comic filth is a surprisingly sharp meditation on desperation, identity, and the stories damaged people tell themselves to avoid confronting who they have become.

It is messy. It is loud. It occasionally feels possessed.

And it is very difficult to forget.

The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon by Barry Maher offers readers a bold and unconventional story filled with humor, insight, and sharp observations. You can find the book on Amazon.