Briony Campbell and Natasha Caruana: Projects and Personal Narratives

Briony Campbell and Natasha Caruana both make work out of private material: a family illness, a marriage market, the wreckage of other people's relationships. Both were on the bill of a PhotoForum evening in London on 14 February 2017. This page is a profile of the published work and of the methods behind it.

Briony Campbell

Campbell is a filmmaker and photographer who took an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, completing it with distinction in 2009. Her about page describes her current practice as devising and facilitating participatory art and creative research projects, alongside documentary and commissioned film work for clients including the Guardian, the Southbank Centre, the Royal Academy of Arts, the NHS and the Photographers' Gallery. Her listed awards include the Bar Tur Award in 2011 and a Magenta Foundation Flash Forward award in 2010.

The Dad Project is the work she is best known for. It was made with her father, David Campbell, during his terminal illness, and combines photographs, short captions, narrative text and film. Her own framing is two sentences: "This is my attempt to say goodbye to my Dad with the help of my camera," and "This is the story of an ending without an ending." The project page carries the pictures with her written account of making them, her father's own blog and his obituaries in the Guardian and the Independent.

Two things about the method are worth noting. The work is collaborative, in that it exists because the person photographed agreed to it and left his own written record alongside hers. It is also deliberately unresolved: the captions carry dates and plain information, and the sequence does not build to a conclusion. Her later projects continue in that participatory direction, including the films Love in Translation and Between Beliefs, and Beyond Belief, shown at Conway Hall in London in 2024.

Natasha Caruana

Caruana is based in London and is a senior lecturer in photography at University of the Arts London. She took an MA at the Royal College of Art between 2006 and 2008, and co-authored Behind the Image: Research in Photography with Anna Fox for AVA in 2012. Her biography page lists work held by the British Library, the Women's Library and the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, and long-listings for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2018 and 2022.

Married Man, dated 2008 to 2009, came out of dates she arranged through websites for married men seeking affairs. She photographed the men without identifying them, recorded the encounters on a device hidden in a red purse that appears in several frames, and used a cheap disposable camera, so the pictures are grainy and loosely framed. The series was shown at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in 2010 and in the project space of the ICP Museum in New York in 2016, and Here Press published it as a book in 2015. Details are on the project page.

Fairytale for Sale works from found material. Caruana collected online adverts placed by women selling wedding dresses they no longer wanted, posed as a buyer to obtain higher-resolution files, and published the sellers' own reasons beside the pictures: clearing space, making room for a baby, a divorce. Faces are obscured, so a day built for an album becomes anonymous. It was exhibited at the Open Data Institute in London in 2015, curated by Hannah Redler, and shown at the Centre for British Photography in 2023. Her project page sets out the method.

First-person documentary and its working rules

Both practices belong to a strand of British documentary in which the photographer is inside the story, and both run into the same problem: consent has to be continuous rather than granted once, and the person in the frame is often the person least able to say no. Campbell's answer was to make the project jointly and to publish her father's words beside her pictures. Caruana's was to remove identity from the pictures of men who had not agreed to be identified, and to let the sellers of the wedding dresses speak for themselves.

Our article on photographing mothers and family looks at book-length projects made inside families. The speakers index lists other photographers covered here.

Photo Forum is an independent journal. We are not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group or with theprintspace, the venue that hosted its meetings. Neither photographer has written or approved this page, and the facts above come from the published sources linked in the text.