Murray Russell
Langton

I learned my trade in the dark. My apprenticeship was in black and white printing at Brook-Tella, London's oldest photographic house. The first lesson was the one that stayed with me: read the negative properly before you try to change it. Every print depends on understanding what's already there.

From Brook-Tella I moved through Applause, Metro, Gordon Bishop Associates and Capital Printers, then started my own businesses, first Acorn and then Real Focus. For nine years at Real Focus I ran a studio, a lab and a team. We photographed architecture and super-prime interiors for developers, designers, architects and private clients, and wrote and designed the brochures that carried the work. Much of it was for people who valued their privacy, and it has never been published.

You'll find the photography at buzz-photography.com.

Property led me into data and communications. At LonRes I worked with financial institutions and London's leading agents. At Andovar I spent nine years delivering multilingual content in more than 40 languages. That taught me that a message has to be culturally right, not just translated, and it put me close to the early days of language technology and AI.

Bangkok became home, and in 2024 I founded One Create, a business communications agency built around a simple aim: helping brands and people be found, seen, remembered and understood. I hold the creative and the client relationship, write the creative direction, and bring in the best people for each brief, whether that's a campaign, a film, a shoot or a brand story.

Alongside the agency I edit One Create Magazine, which is about creation and craft. Coming soon is Liminal Radio, a show I host that takes its shape from Desert Island Discs, without the music. Each guest answers ten questions that trace their life, with two minutes on the clock for each and a friendly buzzer to keep things moving. Every episode closes with the same question: what is the one question no one has ever asked you, and what's your answer?

My London years never left me. I spent decades inside the city's property world, photographing its finest homes and working with its leading agents and lenders. That's why I co-founded MAANTA Intelligence, a private intelligence platform for UK property.

MAANTA reads planning, ownership and opportunity at the level decisions are made. It works by introduction only, for family offices, private banks, principals and intermediaries, particularly where Southeast Asian capital meets UK property. It operates between Singapore and London, and it brings together everything I've learned about reading a building, a market and the people behind them.

I write as Murray Russell, mostly at night, and the work falls into three parts.

Research

TRUTH: The Matrix of Life and Our Alien Past and Future is a work of nonfiction built on long research. It tests declassified files, sworn testimony, peer-reviewed papers and first-hand accounts against one another, and separates what is proven from what is reasoned and what is only believed.

Fiction

REAWAKEN is my first novel, a thriller with the geopolitics of the Middle East at its heart. It opens the James Aldridge series, and the second book, RECRUITMENT, is in development.

Scripts

Warrior Charge is a feature screenplay set in London's music scene of 1980, a world I knew from the inside. Ghost Shop is a short psychological horror film set in Yaowarat, Bangkok's Chinatown, drawing on the mythology of Sak Yant.

These look like separate careers, but they come from the same place. A negative, a building, a brand, a market and a manuscript all need reading properly before you decide what they should become.