the messy founder

Hey, Hi, Hello.

I am Kim, the photographer, creative, The Messy Founder and human behind Photography by Kimberley Anne.

I am a storyteller and visual branding mentor for creatives and rural businesses. I am also a mum of two, a little neurospicy, probably an oversharer, and pretty open about life and all the messy bits that come with it. If you can’t tell already, I have never really fit neatly into one box, and neither has my business. These days, that’s something I embrace rather than try to change.

I work incredibly intuitively. I am someone who feels my way through things, follows the little sparks when they come and tends to know when something is right long before I can logically explain why. A lot of what I have built has come from trusting that instinct, initiating ideas that feel aligned and being willing to try, learn, change direction and try again. I am not really designed to follow a perfectly mapped-out path. I work in waves. I need space to find clarity. I learn by actually living things, experimenting, getting some things wildly right, making mistakes and seeing them for what they are, part of figuring it all out. Then I take what I have learnt and turn it into something useful. That flows through the way I photograph, support others and run my businesses too.

I don’t want to manufacture connection or make people perform for a camera. I read the people in front of me, the energy, the relationships and what is happening in the moment, and work from there. Sometimes that means giving direction and taking the lead, and sometimes it means getting out of the way and letting something unfold naturally.

Over the years, my photography has organically shifted with me. I started in a world that was much more “sit here, smile at the camera, wear this, stand like that.” Now I find myself asking completely different questions. What feels like you? What do you actually love? How does your family really spend time together? What are the tiny things your kids do right now that you never want to forget? What places, people, smells, sounds and ordinary moments will become their core memories? What do you want to remember when this version of your life doesn’t exist anymore?

I think social media tells us every single day what we should be doing, what we should be buying, how we should dress, what our homes should look like, how we should parent, how we should run our businesses and even how we should show up as people. It is really bloody easy to lose ourselves in all of that. I don’t want to create photographs of who the internet has told you to be. I want to document what is already yours. And honestly, I think the same thing has happened in business. We are constantly being shown what we should post, what we should sell, which strategy we should follow, what our branding should look like and what apparently makes a business “successful”. It can become so easy to build something based on everybody else’s rules that somewhere along the way, you lose the person who started it.

That is why the way I approach branding and business is much the same as the way I approach photography. I am not interested in telling people what their brand should look like because it’s trending, or handing them a formula that worked for somebody else. I am much more interested in asking:

Who are you? What do you care about? What do you want people to feel when they come into contact with your business?  Who are your people?  What makes sense for your life, your community and the thing you are actually trying to build?  Then we work out how to make the way you show up visually actually feel like you.

More than anything, I am all about putting the human back into business and life. We have access to more technology, automation and AI than ever before, and I am absolutely not against any of it. I use it too. There are incredible ways we can use technology to make running a business easier, but somewhere along the way, I think we have started automating away some of the very things that make people want to connect with a business in the first place. As consumers, we are constantly being marketed to, funnelled, automated, optimised and sold to. Sometimes it feels like we have become data points rather than people, and it is getting harder to know when there is actually a human on the other side.

I also love a good chat, so my novel length version can be found below.