Alex Ingram and Ameena Rojee: Photographer Profiles

Alex Ingram and Ameena Rojee both work in long projects about people and place, and both earn a living from commissions while those projects develop slowly in the background. A PhotoForum evening in London on 14 March 2017 put the two of them on the same bill. What follows is a profile of their published work, not a report of that night.

Alex Ingram

Ingram is a commercial lifestyle and portrait photographer based in London, represented by the agency Darwin Studio. His biography page lists clients including the BBC, Netflix, Nike, Google, the RNLI, NHS England and Condé Nast Traveller, and sets out the thread that runs through the personal work too: "Fundamentally, Alex's work is about people." The projects, he writes, come out of his relationships with people he has grown up with, met or been influenced by.

Four long-form projects sit alongside the commercial and editorial sections of his site: The Gatekeepers, An Unconditional Love, Generations and Valdeluz. The Gatekeepers, listed as current work, follows wardens who live on the very small islands around the coast of the UK. It is a subject that needs patience and travel rather than access to a news event, which is the usual trade-off in self-funded documentary work.

Valdeluz shows how he builds a story around a place. Valdeluz is a town roughly 37 miles from Madrid, begun in 2004 after Spain announced a high-speed rail network with a stop at nearby Guadalajara. According to Ingram's project text, the developer Reyal Urbis put $1.6 billion into the scheme. The 2008 crash stopped construction after the first of four planned phases, and only 197 people moved into a town designed for more than 30,000. The work does not stop at the ruin: the population has since grown past 4,000, a supermarket, parks and a sports hall have arrived, and the primary school reopened in 2017. The sequence is on his site.

Ameena Rojee

Rojee works from Croydon and describes herself as a "photographer, writer & walker" making "stories about our relationship with the more-than-human world". The work is tied to specific ground: she is an ambassador for the North Downs Way, a ranger for London National Park City, and an associate lecturer at Cambridge School of Art. Her client list includes the National Gallery, the London Library, Inkcap Journal, Hyphen and the Telegraph Saturday Magazine. The details are on her information page.

Her project index lists seven bodies of work, among them the burn, between scree and soil, rural croydon and crocus valley. Her own description of the last is one line: "Crocus Valley is a love letter to Croydon, my home." It was published in 2023 by RRB Photobooks and Platform, and her earlier book A love letter to Croydon came out with Another Place Press in 2020. Her publication list also includes Portrait of Britain Vol. 7, the annual selection published by British Journal of Photography in 2025.

Where this kind of work gets published

Neither practice fits the old model of a staff photographer on assignment. Both depend on a second route to an audience: the small-press photobook, the festival wall and the commission from an institution with an interest in place. RRB Photobooks, which published Crocus Valley, is a Bristol publisher and bookseller whose stated focus is British documentary photography, and presses of that size print in the low hundreds or thousands, which is why such a book can matter in the field and still be hard to find a year later.

The other pattern is long association with one place. Rojee's roles on the North Downs Way and with London National Park City produce work that no one-week assignment can, and Ingram's island wardens approach the same ground from the other direction, through the people who keep it running.

If you are following the same thread, the speakers index lists other photographers covered on this site. The following month's profiles cover three more photographers working between commissions and personal projects.

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, and neither photographer on this page is involved in writing or approving it. Everything above comes from published sources, which are linked so you can check them.