A lifetime of images, focused on one thing.
I'm Ian Bursill. I design and produce albums that do justice to the photographs they contain, drawing on a career spent in print, design and photography.
It started with a Box Brownie
I took my first photographs in 1978, aged twelve, with a Kodak Box Brownie I was given for helping clear a family farmhouse. My dad, a keen amateur photographer, cut photographic paper to fit the back of it, and in the darkroom he'd set up in my bedroom I watched the image appear. It came out as a negative, but I was hooked.
A week later, Dad took me to Jessops in Leicester and bought me a Zorki 4, a cheap Russian copy of a Leica. I took it everywhere. I even photographed a couple of weddings in the early '80s, after which I vowed never to be a wedding photographer.
Print, design, then weddings
My career with Images began long before I ever picked up a camera professionally: ten years in print production and pre-press, learning how ink, colour and paper behave, then four years running a design studio, learning layout, composition and visual storytelling.
About twenty years ago, Lisa, a former employee, recommended me to a customer who needed a wedding photographer. I took the job on and, just as with the Box Brownie, once I saw the couple's reaction to their photographs, I was hooked. Oh my, how times change. I went on to photograph more than 450 weddings, was named WPJA UK Photographer of the Year in 2009, and won Best Photographer in the East Midlands in 2012, 2014 and 2015. My work was published, exhibited and recognised internationally.
My final wedding is booked for May 2027. After that, the cameras come out only for personal projects, and my work focuses solely on getting albums back into people's hands and onto bookshelves for future generations to treasure, because, as each year passes, those photographs become even more valuable.
Why albums
The thing I kept coming back to was the album, and the sudden decline in people having one made.
Time and again I saw beautiful photographs, mine and others', that never became anything physical: couples with stunning galleries and nothing on the shelf, families with decades of history on failing hard drives.
A photographer on a forum once described laying out a timeline of storage on his wedding fayre stand: floppy disks, Zip drives, CDs, DVDs, memory sticks, and finally a card with a link to an online gallery. Sooner or later someone would point out that most of it was redundant.
“Precisely,” he'd reply. “That's why I offer these beautiful albums. They'll never go redundant.”
A well-made album asks nothing of technology. You open it, and it's there, the same in fifty years as the day it was printed. That's what Bursill Albums is: not a photo-book website or a faceless print shop, but one person with thirty years' experience, making albums worthy of the photographs inside them, and treating every project, whether it's a wedding, a family heritage collection or a faded print from the 1940s, with the same care.
I offer a small, carefully curated range from makers I know and trust, not an endless catalogue. The right product, chosen well, beats infinite choice every time.
You deal with me directly, from the first conversation to the finished album. No account managers, no handovers, no call centres.
Archival materials, the finest makers, and a print background mean I sweat the details most people never notice, but those details determine whether an album survives a lifetime.
Great documentary-style wedding photography is an art that is hugely in demand, and British photographer Ian Bursill has just proved that he is one of the best in the world at delivering this service.
Albums people still reach for, years later.
"We love our photo album. Now 13 years later, and with two children, it's great to sit with them and go through it — a treasured keepsake we will always be grateful for."
"You created more than a documentary of the day. You created a moment in time that will never be forgotten."
"We adore and cherish our album — it's regularly pulled out, and even though the day was 11 years ago, it's instantly brought alive again, as if we were there doing it all again."
"We love our album and we are really pleased we had one — it's beautiful!"
"We love our album and have our favourite shot from you hanging in our living room, 13 years (and two kids) later."
"Our album sits proudly on our bookshelf, and this canvas sits perfectly above our bed, where our two-and-a-half-year-old points out all his favourite people!"
"We absolutely love our album, it is perfect and everything we ever dreamed it would be, thank you so much for capturing our very special day so beautifully, we certainly chose well with you, you were definitely the best guy to capture our day."