Kate Stansworth and Mark Aitken: Photographer Profiles

Kate Stanworth and Mark Aitken both make photographs about belonging, but they approach it from opposite directions. Stanworth works with communities abroad and in Britain, mostly on commission for charities and newspapers. Aitken photographed the people living on his own street in Brixton while their homes were under threat. Their names appear together on this address because they spoke at a London photography talk in June 2017, and the page below introduces the work rather than the evening. Stanworth's surname is also listed as Stansworth in some records of those talks.

Kate Stanworth

Kate Stanworth is a London-based photographer and artist. Her own account of her practice describes using photography to tell stories about human resilience, identity and the search for belonging, built on long-term relationships of trust with individuals and communities in places as far apart as Somaliland and Argentina.

The commercial side of that practice is unusually clearly stated. She writes that her clients are predominantly non-governmental organisations in the United Kingdom and abroad, naming Save the Children, Marie Curie, Shelter, Mencap, SaferWorld, the Big Leaf Foundation and The Queen's Nursing Institute among them, alongside editorial publication by The Guardian, The Sunday Times, BBC News, Al Jazeera, The Economist, CNN and Internazionale. She also leads photography workshops. Her personal projects include Somaliland Summer, La Locura, Where We Are Now and Islamic Traces of Sicily.

One documented project shows how she works when she cannot be in the room. In April 2020 the Rebecca Vassie Trust published Separate, Together, for which Stanworth was one of several photographers commissioned to respond to the pandemic. She started from a neighbours' WhatsApp group in south-east London that had organised food and medicine deliveries for people who were isolating. Because social distancing made it impractical to photograph the group herself, she set the members photographic challenges through the same WhatsApp group, sending example images and asking them to document their own experiences, thoughts and fears. The participants produced the pictures, including self-portraits, and the work was shown through the Trust's channels later that month.

The commissioner matters here. The Rebecca Vassie Trust is a charity supporting long-form narrative photography and photographic education, set up after the death of the British photojournalist Rebecca Vassie, who died aged 30 while on assignment in Uganda in 2015. It runs a memorial award for emerging photographers, and small awards of this kind fund a good deal of British documentary work that no newspaper would commission.

Mark Aitken

Mark Aitken is a photographer and filmmaker based in south London and a member of Photofusion in Brixton. His best known photographic series is Sanctum Ephemeral, a set of portraits of his neighbours on the Cressingham Gardens estate in Brixton. The book, self-published in 2019, runs to 55 pages in a signed and numbered first edition of 60 copies, with text by Howard Cunnell and an afterword by the curator Zelda Cheatle.

What makes the series distinctive is what it leaves out. The estate had been earmarked for demolition and its residents had spent years campaigning to save their homes, which would be the obvious subject. The publisher's description notes that Aitken's work does not focus on the politics of that situation and instead examines how people define their homes and how their homes define them. The portraits are therefore made inside the flats rather than on the picket line, and the housing dispute is present as a condition rather than a story.

The work was shown in London while the project was still developing. Photofusion's group exhibition Made in Brixton, which ran from 21 June to 15 July 2017, brought together seven of its members, with Aitken's Sanctum Ephemeral alongside work by Katie Barlow, Carole Evans, Camille Mack, Chris Moyse, Nik Strangelove and Alys Tomlinson. The exhibition was built around projects about the organisation's own community, which is the context in which Aitken's estate portraits make the most sense.

Photographing the place you live in

Both photographers on this page have made work in the streets around their homes, which is a recognisable strand in British documentary photography rather than a coincidence. Access rests on an existing relationship, so consent is renegotiated over years rather than secured for an afternoon. The projects tend to be self-funded or supported by small awards and member organisations, which is why they so often arrive as short-run books and group shows rather than magazine features. They also tend to record change, because the photographer is still there when the rents rise or the demolition notices arrive.

Other photographers in London working this way are covered on our page for Freya Najade and Jenny Lewis, and more are listed in the speakers index. The full set of pages built from the London talks archive is at previous talks.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, and it does not organise events.