Bleak, Beautiful, and Honest: Randall Patrick’s Savannah

April 16, 2025

Randall Patrick sees it.

A photographer by instinct and necessity, Randall isn’t out here chasing the perfect sunset shot over River Street or the clichéd Spanish Moss covered live oak trees that tourists drool over. His Savannah is a little rougher around the edges. And yet, somehow, it’s hopeful too.

“I like to see things as they are and not have any manipulation to it,” Randall tells me. “Everything deserves to have a meaning and an existence.” That philosophy bleeds through his work — moody, grainy shots of forgotten corners, or forgetten people, a rusted mailbox clinging to a fence. Things most of us pass without a second glance. But in Randall’s frame, they matter.

He didn’t always see the world this way. Before the lens, there was music. A different kind of storytelling. “I think I picked up a camera after playing music for a long time, and felt like I didn’t really hold on to a lot of memories,” he says.

There’s a moody, cinematic quality to his images, but it’s not artifice. Randall isn’t interested in glossy perfection or airbrushed realities. “I guess, kind of like a sad, bleak, but hopeful existence of modern life,” is how he describes his work. “My photos are sad, but also, they have that glimmer of just like, reality.”

It’s that commitment to authenticity that makes his unexpected foray into wedding photography so compelling. Weddings, in their cookie-cutter, Pinterest board glory, aren’t typically playgrounds for gritty, honest storytelling. But Randall, true to form, made them his own. “I wanted to shoot it as if I was shooting whatever else I shoot all the time,” he says. “My vision of what a dreamy wedding is, is like, I don’t know — super low, dim lighting, capturing really authentic moments and not so staged like you see in weddings all the time.”

Randall is the kind of guy who seems allergic to pretense. When I ask what’s next, there’s no grand master plan. No self-important manifesto about the meaning of art. Just a hunger to keep going, to keep making, to keep documenting the things that matter.

If you want to follow along, you can find him on Instagram at @randallonfilm or through his site, randallpatrickfilm.com.