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Marco Betti, owner of Antica Posta, a Tuscan restaurant and bar in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, plays tennis at Wellbridge’s Athletic Club Northeast in Atlanta, Ga., on September 22, 2009. Betti, who splits his time between the restaurant’s exhibition kitchen and its wine dinners, uses time on the court to stay active outside the kitchen.
Every gym has a wall of equipment. Not every gym has a wall of stories.
Back in the mid-2000s, I had the chance to work with Wellbridge on a project that’s stuck with me ever since — not because of the lighting setups or the shot lists, but because of who I met on the other side of the camera.
Wellbridge wanted to do something different with their marketing. Instead of another glossy mailer full of stock photography — the generic smiling model on a treadmill that nobody actually recognizes — they wanted to show the people who were already walking through their doors. Real members. Real trainers. Real results. The idea was simple: let the club’s own patrons tell the story of what membership had done for their lives, and back it up with photographs that felt honest rather than staged.
That’s where I came in.
Finding the Story in the Session
My approach to this kind of work goes back to something my mentor, the late Don Rutledge, drilled into me early in my career: you don’t find the real story by posing someone in isolation. You find it by staying close to the relationship — between a person and their work, their trainer, their routine, the thing that actually matters to them. So instead of setting up a sterile portrait station in a corner of the club, I spent time in the actual sessions. Step aerobics classes with steppers and hand weights. One-on-one training sessions. The unglamorous, sweaty, in-progress moments that don’t usually make it into a marketing mailer — because those are the moments that are true.
Over the course of the project, I photographed a wide range of Wellbridge members, each with a completely different reason for walking through the door:
- A Georgia Tech professor whose entire career was built on studying human performance — using his own training as a real-world extension of the science he taught in the classroom.
- A prominent Atlanta chef, whose long hours on his feet in a high-heat kitchen made his own health and stamina non-negotiable.
- An independent PR executive, whose days were built around client calls and deadlines, using her time at the club as one of the only hours in her schedule that belonged to her.
- Members connected to organizations like the CDC, along with entrepreneurs, parents, and everyday Atlantans — each with their own version of “why I’m here.”
What struck me, session after session, was how different the reasons were and how similar the result was. A professor who wanted sharper focus for his research. A chef who needed more energy to make it through service. A PR pro who needed one hour a day that wasn’t about anyone else’s deadline but her own. Different lives, same thread: showing up consistently changed how they showed up everywhere else.
Why This Kind of Work Matters
Mailers built around stock photography get glanced at and recycled. Mailers built around a neighbor, a familiar face from the community, someone whose kid goes to the same school — those get read. That’s the power of documentary-style photography in a marketing context: it doesn’t manufacture trust; it reveals trust that’s already there.
For Wellbridge, that meant a library of images they could drop into direct mail campaigns targeted at the neighborhoods surrounding each club — real members, photographed in real sessions, with testimonials that reflected their actual experience rather than a copywriter’s guess at one.
For me, it was a reminder of why I got into this work in the first place. Everybody has a reason they showed up. My job is just to stay close enough, long enough, to see it.
If you run a gym, studio, or wellness business and want to tell your members’ stories the same way — through real sessions, not staged portraits — get in touch to talk about a patron photography project for your own marketing.
