Portraits from the Wingshooting World

By Ed Carroll
From our July/August 2026 issue

Photographer Terry Allen’s new coffee-table tome of black & white photographs—Faces: Portraits from the Wingshooting World—offers an expansive documentary of a community joined by devotion to great guns and wingshooting adventures. Most of its 320 10" x 10" portraits share a straightforward style of sparse lighting and black backdrops, portraying Allen’s subjects with the rich textures and tack-sharp contrasts reminiscent of the old silver-gelatin grayscale.

Allen—a frequent contributor to Shooting Sportsman—is an A-list rockstar of fine-gun and wingshooting photography who seems to know everyone and to have been everywhere. Faces gathers a galaxy of friends from across this community, as if Keith Richards presented a photo album of noteworthy friends met throughout a hardworking, road-weary lifetime. Inspired by and dedicated to Simon Clode, the owner and CEO of gunmaker Westley Richards who died in 2016, Allen’s traveling-photobooth style presents artisans and aristocrats—even writers and publishers!—with equal warmth and dignity. Allen writes in the introduction that “I consider this body of work a time capsule, not only of the industry I have had the honor to work in, but of treasured time spent with a community of people that have become a big part of my life.”

This “Who’s Who” of the wingshooting world offers readers the surprising, page-turning entertainment of “who’s next?” Portraits of action filers, barrel blackers and engravers mingle with the scions of prestigious, centuries-old firms and the pioneers of high-tech gunmaking. There are lodge owners, shooting coaches, gun dealers and collectors, clothiers, chefs, dog trainers, conservationists and historians. There are living legends alongside little-known craftsmen with lifetimes at the bench. Interspersed among the portraits are images of landscapes, hunting scenes and gunmakers at work.

Faces: Portraits from the Wingshooting World is a well-designed, self-published book, and signed copies are available for $120.