Stacey Bramhall is a New York City photographer whose work isn’t about perfection, it’s about the perfect moment.

Trained as a painter, Stacey entered photography just as the field went digital — starting with brush-in-hand retouching on actual prints, then quickly becoming her lab's first digital retoucher. She went on to provide retouching for high-end clients, with work appearing in campaigns for In Style, People, Travel + Leisure, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and helped build the Somos stock photography brand — later a joint venture with Corbis — as partner and digital department head, managing the retouching team and guarding the collection's aesthetic.

Her own photography is a deliberate reversal of all that polish. Distortion, saturated color, blur, and the visual artifacts of memory are not defects to be corrected but the emotional truth of the image. A photograph, in her view, is finished not when it is clean, but when it feels the way the moment felt. Her ongoing series explore New York as a place remembered rather than merely seen.

Her photographs have appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, TIME, Newsweek, Architectural Digest, Elle, GQ, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Vox, and Lonely Planet among others.

Bramhall is also a working designer whose clients have ranged from a president, New York State Senators to film and media projects — a practice she continues to grow alongside her photography.