Surrey Students’ Union
How Surrey Students’ Union Stopped Telling and Started Showing
There’s a particular challenge that most student-facing organisations know well. You can write about belonging, energy and community until the words stop meaning anything, but the moment a student lands on your page and sees imagery that feels staged, polished or quietly fake, you’ve already lost them.
Students, more than almost any other audience, can spot the difference between an organisation showing itself and an organisation performing itself.
Surrey Students’ Union knew this, which is why they came to us.
The Challenge
The Union runs on a simple but demanding brief: make every student at the University of Surrey feel like there’s a place for them. Whether they’re looking for advice, thinking about joining a society, wanting to vote in elections or just trying to work out what the Union actually is, photography is often the first thing that helps them decide whether it’s somewhere they belong.
The problem is that student communities are genuinely hard to photograph well. As Alex McKee, CEO of the Union, puts it:
“Authenticity. Students quickly recognise when something feels staged or overly polished.”
Generic imagery doesn’t just fail to attract students, it actively undermines trust in an organisation whose entire purpose is to represent them.
The Approach
We’ve now worked with the Union across multiple annual photo shoots, and the approach has stayed consistent: we direct experiences, not poses.
Using real students, every scene is considered carefully in advance. We know what story each scene needs to tell, which spaces communicate the Union’s personality best, and what moments are worth waiting for. But within that framework, the student models interact naturally rather than performing for the camera.
The result, as Alex describes it, is imagery that “feels authentic, engaging and true to the Union”, because it is. Nobody is pretending to have fun, they’re actually having it.
Hannah Jones, Head of Voice and Communications at the Union, puts it simply:
“Our models always feel at ease instantly, and that ease and natural enjoyment of the shoot comes through in the photos.”
The Impact
The Union now has an image library that works across everything they do throughout the year - advice services, events, elections, society recruitment, social media, and print, all anchored by photography that consistently looks and feels like the same organisation.
More importantly, it works. As Alex explains:
“Strong imagery builds trust. When students recognise real people, real spaces, and authentic experiences, our communications feel more credible and relatable.”
Photography that once needed to tell students the Union was welcoming now simply shows them that it is. The Union doesn’t have to argue its case, the images make it for them.
“Sophie has helped student lives become the centre of our brand’s presence,” says Hannah. “If you need images that breathe life, get Sophie in.”
