About Amber
Photographer | Artist | Designer
Ceud mile failte!
My name is Amber Mhairi Buchanan. I am a photographer, visual artist, and designer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My work is rooted in visual storytelling, atmosphere, symbolism, and the strange beauty of the overlooked.
For more than 20 years, I have practiced photography and creative work alongside a varied professional life. My background includes serving as the COO of a multi-million-dollar vertically integrated cannabis start-up and CAO of several non-profit organizations, freelance cannabis writing resulting in over 24 published articles and 2 citations in books about cannabis, sociopolitical reporting for local newspapers and online magazines, and even publishing scientific research in parasitic plant physiology and genetics. That range of experience has shaped the way I approach both creative and commercial work: with curiosity, adaptability, strategy, and an eye for the deeper story beneath the surface.
My practice moves between fine art and practical visual service. I create photography, mixed media work (both digital and physical), portraits, visual storytelling, and design-based projects for collectors, individuals, small businesses, makers, creators, musicians, and organizations looking for imagery with depth, atmosphere, and emotional presence.
Creative Work
My creative work begins with a search for beauty where it is not immediately expected: in dimly lit venues, ordinary streets, fleeting expressions, worn textures, strange juxtapositions, and the quiet theatricality of everyday life. Through photography and mixed media, I am drawn to moments that feel both real and slightly otherworldly—images that reveal the symbolic, emotional, or uncanny charge hidden beneath ordinary experience.
My background in music photography shaped my eye for intensity, atmosphere, and performance. Photographing musicians taught me to look for the instant when a person seems to become more than themselves: when gesture, light, sound, and emotion converge into something almost mythic. That sense of heightened presence continues to influence my work beyond the stage.
In street photography, I am drawn to the accidental poetry of public life: objects, architecture, strangers, shadows, and visual fragments that briefly align into meaning. My portrait work turns that same attention inward, using the face, body, setting, and personal objects as sites of identity, vulnerability, self-mythology, and transformation.
I am now expanding this visual language through surreal photography and mixed media works, combining documentary instincts with dreamlike imagery, collage, symbolic objects, and layered textures. My goal is not simply to record what is visible, but to reveal the emotional and symbolic atmosphere surrounding it.
I make art as a way of romanticizing the overlooked without sanitizing it. I make art that makes a statement. I am interested in beauty that is strange, imperfect, melancholic, ritualistic, intimate, or decaying. Across music, streets, portraits, and surreal compositions, my work asks how ordinary moments can become portals—how the mundane can hold mystery, and how unexpected settings can expose something luminous, haunting, and deeply human.
In addition to offering original works as they are available,select print products of my creative works are available for collectors here on my website, including canvases and posters.
Research
I am currently pursuing studies in Art History at the NSCAD University, with the goal of researching the symbolic visual language used to represent the feminine across time and cultures.
Rather than focusing only on literal depictions of women, I am especially interested in the objects, shapes, colors, materials, gestures, plants, fruits, animals, landscapes, and recurring motifs that have been used to signify femininity, female power, fertility, beauty, sexuality, domesticity, danger, decay, transformation, and death.
A central question guiding my research is: how has art used symbolism to construct, encode, and transmit cultural ideas about the feminine and what has been the role of art in the evolution of these concepts?
Across different societies and historical periods, the feminine has often been represented through indirect visual signs: the vessel, the flower, the mirror, the fruit, the moon, the serpent, the veil, the garden, the womb-like space, the threshold, the wound, the skull, or the circle. These symbols can suggest nurture, seduction, mystery, purity, corruption, birth, mortality, spiritual power, or social control, often without depicting the female body directly.
I am interested in how these symbols evolved, why certain forms became associated with the feminine, and how religion, mythology, ritual, witchcraft, medicine, domestic life, colonial exchange, beauty standards, and patriarchal social structures shaped visual codes of femininity. I am particularly drawn to the contradictions within feminine symbolism: life and death, beauty and danger, purity and sexuality, creation and destruction, containment and power.
I am also interested in how feminist, surrealist, modern, and contemporary artists have challenged or reclaimed these inherited symbols. By reworking traditional motifs of femininity, artists can expose the cultural assumptions embedded within them and create new meanings around the body, identity, spirituality, beauty, and mortality.
Through both research and creative practice, I hope to better understand how symbolic forms carry gendered meaning across time and culture, and how artists continue to transform those meanings today.
Commercial Work
The same visual instincts that shape my creative practice also guide my commercial work. I do not approach commercial photography or design as generic content production. I approach it as visual storytelling: a way to help a person, product, business, or creative project communicate its identity with clarity, atmosphere, and emotional impact.
I work with small businesses, makers, artists, creators, independent professionals, and organizations that want visuals that feel personal, intentional, and distinct from mass-produced branding. My commercial work is especially suited to clients who do not want sterile templates, disposable content, or imagery that looks like everyone else’s. I create images and design elements tailored to each client’s tone, audience, values, and personality.
My services include live music photography, product photography, promo videos and looping visuals, promotional images, business portraits, creative portraits, brand photography, visual identity clean-up, social and website imagery, and custom visual packages for launches, shops, portfolios, events, services, and creative projects.
What sets my commercial work apart is the one-on-one nature of the service. I take time to understand what each client actually needs: what they are trying to communicate, who they are trying to reach, what mood they want to create, and what practical materials will serve them best. Some clients need clean, polished product images. Others need portraits that feel expressive rather than stiff. Others need help refining the look of their website, packaging, printed materials, or overall brand presence.
My goal is to offer accessible, high-quality creative support without forcing clients into a one-size-fits-all package if it doesn’t address their needs. Each project is built around the individual client, their budget, their audience, and the visual language that best represents their work.
I am especially interested in working with independent businesses, artists, makers, performers, writers, wellness practitioners, vintage sellers, craftspeople, local shops, and creative professionals who want imagery that feels human, atmospheric, and memorable.
Through color, composition, texture, tone, and symbolism, I aim to create commercial visuals that do more than show what something looks like. I want them to communicate what it feels like, why it matters, and why someone should stop and pay attention.