Nicola Muirhead and Derek Man: Photographer Profiles

Nicola Muirhead photographs Bermuda, the island she comes from, and the long shadow that colonial history casts over how people there describe themselves. Derek Man photographs Hong Kong, the city he left at seventeen, and the housing conditions that shape who gets to stay in it. Both work on home from a distance. They shared a London talk programme on 13 November 2018.

Nicola Muirhead

Nicola Muirhead is a Bermudian documentary photographer. The Belfast Photo Festival describes her practice as research-led and collaborative, and records an MA in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism from University of the Arts London. She is a member of Women Photograph, and her work has been published by the BBC, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine and The Washington Post.

Descendants of Summer

Descendants of Summer is her long project on Bermudian identity. It combines portraiture, landscape, archive material and oral history to examine how colonialism and slavery continue to shape the island. The title points to Bermuda's earliest colonial name, the Summer Isles. The festival's description of the work notes that Bermuda became the first British colony to legalise slavery, in 1616.

The project has run for years rather than months. Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art presented Descendants of Summer: A Preview at its Rick Faries Gallery from 4 to 29 October 2024, describing an eight-year documentary effort and showing experimental film, digital photography, archival images, video, artefacts and interviews together. Masterworks frames the aim as preserving the oral histories of the island's memory keepers. Muirhead gave an artist talk on her process there on 28 October 2024.

Her earlier London work, In Brutal Presence, documented tenants of Trellick Tower in North Kensington: the same question of who holds a place's memory, approached from the other side.

Derek Man

Derek Man is a photographer born in Hong Kong and based in the United Kingdom. His website lists projects including Close to Home, Fragrant Harbour, Tong Yan Gai, The Isle of Wight Analogy and Serious Money. He has said that moving to Britain at seventeen is what gave him an interest in home, displacement and a sense of place.

Close to Home

Close to Home documents Hong Kong's subdivided flats, where high rents push households into units carved out of a single apartment. It's Nice That, writing on 18 July 2017, reported that Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool approached Man to make a body of work about Hong Kong and that he chose housing as the subject. He worked with the Society for Community Organisation, a local NGO supporting people in substandard housing, and photographed families sharing a single room and men living in the closet-sized units known as coffin homes.

The series sets those interiors against new developments in Kowloon, so the luxury flats and the subdivided ones appear in the same sequence. Man has said he intended the work to prompt a conversation in London as well.

Photographing the place you left

Both practices belong to a recognisable strand of documentary work: the photographer returns to a home place with the training and the distance acquired elsewhere.

• Access is easier, and more complicated. Family and community connections open doors a visiting photographer would not get through. They also make it harder to publish something unflattering.
• The archive becomes available. Muirhead draws on archival images and recorded testimony as well as new photographs, which is usually only possible when the photographer is trusted locally.
• The timescale stretches. An eight-year project is normal in this mode, because the subject is not an event but a condition.
• Partnership shapes the work. Man's series exists because a gallery commissioned it and an NGO made the introductions, which is worth stating plainly rather than presenting the work as solitary.
• Audience shifts the reading. Work about Bermuda shown in Belfast, or about Hong Kong shown in Liverpool, is read differently from the same work shown at home.

Other photographers working on housing, migration and belonging appear in our speakers index and across the events archive. The previous talks archive organises those profiles by year.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, with its venue, or with the photographers written about here. Information on this page comes from the published sources linked above.