INTERVIEW
Marjorie Becker
As the latest Accidentally Wes Anderson book goes on sale, Niall Hampton catches up with the project’s official photographer
Marshrutka (shared taxicab) in Kyiv, Ukraine, by Dimitri Bogachuk.
Dimitri Bogachuk
Marjorie Becker
Photographer
Marjorie Becker is a freelance photographer based in New York City, covering music and live events.
In 2020, she started working with Wally and Amanda Koval, on their forthcoming book Accidentally Wes Anderson.
The collaboration led to Becker being appointed AWA’s ‘Chief Adventure Photographer’, and shooting around the world.
AWA’s new book features 61 of Becker’s photos, and she also gave expert insight into images taken by other contributors.
Instagram: @marjoriebeckerphoto
Instagram: @accidentally wesanderson
Published in 2020, Accidentally Wes Anderson took a social media sensation into book form and was translated into eight languages.
For anyone not familiar, the Accidentally Wes Anderson Instagram account was started by Wally Koval in 2017 and is a community of people inspired by the visual aesthetic seen in the celebrated American film director’s work. Best known for quirky and whimsical feature films including
The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch
and
Asteroid City,
Anderson’s distinctive visual grammar complements the narratives of the movies and makes them even more immersive. The Accidentally Wes Anderson Instagram community has almost two million followers, and spin-offs from it include photo trips with the Kovals, called ‘AWA adventures’. Attending these will be Marjorie Becker, AWA’s Chief Adventure Photographer, who spoke to us just before a new book,
Accidentally Wes Anderson Adventures,
went on sale last month…
What does being the Chief Adventure Photographer for Accidentally Wes Anderson entail?
Mostly I go on adventures with Wally, Amanda and the team. We are dispatched to a location, often working with a client or a sponsor to create these types of images. There’s a lot of research that goes on as far as where we’re going and whether there are any other locations that our community would be interested in seeing. My job is mostly creating the photography content and the photography end of things. A lot of the other members of the team are more focused on video creation and video content; they also do some photos and I do some videos, but my primary focus is making those pictures that are going to go into a book or on the website, or perhaps even be seen in a gallery.