Camp Monkey in Marseille: two days of the global Monkey Shoulder gathering

Camp Monkey is Monkey Shoulder’s annual gathering. Each year the brand brings the bartenders of its advocacy programme and its ambassadors from their own markets to one chosen venue, for two days of seminars, workshops, competition and bar visits. In 2025 that venue was Marseille.

The commission came from Ryan Goodman, the brand’s Global Content Creator, with whom I had already shot World Music Day at Next Door Records in London. The brief was precise and fitted in four lines: posed portraits of every attendee, bottle shots, the drinks from the competition, and candid coverage of the bar visits.

A brand-event brief is almost never one job. Here it was four, with four kinds of light and four tempos. A posed portrait needs a background and one consistent look from person to person. A bottle needs calm and complete control. A drinks competition needs speed, in a room you do not choose. A bar crawl needs you to disappear.

So what decides the outcome is not skill at any one of the four, it is the order. Bottles while the room is empty, portraits in the gaps of the programme, and energy kept back for the two hours of the competition, which do not run twice.

The competition ran inside a two-hour window in the evening. It is where everything is decided and where you control the least: the bartenders work fast, the light belongs to the bar, and you need the gesture, the finished glass and the face at once, without ever getting in the way of service.

The only method that holds is to decide beforehand what you will not leave without. Every drink had to exist cleanly, isolated and legible, because the brand would post them one by one. The rest, the laughter and the raised hands, comes on its own if you are still there when the room lets go.

The second day was given to visits of Marseille bars, and the brief asked explicitly for candid. It is the opposite of everything else: no posing, no setting up, no added light. You move through a full room on one lens and accept that half the frames will be useless.

It is also what makes an event set breathe. A series with nothing but clean portraits and immaculate packshots tells you about a catalogue, not about two days.

Choosing Marseille for a global bartender gathering gives the set a light that neither London nor Paris would have given it. The first opening visual was made outdoors at the end of the day, under a vine heavy with grapes: that is a Mediterranean September, and it cannot be built in a studio.

It is also, for me, the easiest kind of commission to honour. Living here means knowing the hours when the light falls, knowing which bars keep their character once they fill up, and having no travel time to negotiate inside an already tight two-day schedule.

The images served Monkey Shoulder’s channels, including a series published drink by drink from the competition. Six weeks after the event, the brand came back for exactly those frames to post them one at a time.

That is the best sign an event set has been done properly: it does not serve once, it gets pulled out again. A drink cleanly isolated on the night is still worth something months later, which is never true of an atmosphere frame on its own.