Documentary Photographers and Photojournalists: Profiles

Profiles of the documentary photographers, photojournalists and portrait makers whose work appears across this site, with links to their own websites and publications.

Who is covered here

The photographers indexed on this site presented documentary projects in London between 2017 and 2020, with a smaller group from a series of written interviews published in 2015 and 2016. That gives a particular cross-section: largely British and London-based, largely working in long-form documentary, photojournalism and portraiture, and mostly at the stage where a first or second major project has been completed but not yet absorbed into institutional collections.

It is not a canon and it is not a ranking. It is a record of who was showing work in one city over a few years, which turns out to be a more interesting thing to read than a list of the already famous.

What a profile contains

Each page introduces a photographer's projects, books and working approach, and links out to their own site so you can see the work at the size and sequence they intended. We describe the work rather than reproduce it: a profile of someone's practice does not give us the right to republish their photographs, and we do not use them without permission.

Facts come from named sources. Where a page mentions an award, a book or a commission, the information comes from the photographer's own site, their publisher, or the organisation that gave the award, and the link goes there. We do not invent quotes, and nothing on this site is presented as something a photographer said to us.

The working territories

Several distinct kinds of practice recur across these profiles, and they are worth separating because the questions each one faces are different.

• Long-form documentary. Projects built over years, often on a single community, place or family. The defining problems are access, sustaining attention and knowing when a project is finished.
• News and press photography. Photographers working to assignment for newspapers and agencies, where the constraints are time, picture desks and the gap between what happened and what will run.
• Portraiture. Both commissioned and self-directed, from studio sittings to street portraits made in a few minutes with strangers.
• Personal and family work. Projects where the subject is the photographer's own life, often illness, bereavement or a parent. These raise consent questions that do not arise elsewhere, because the subject is someone the photographer cannot walk away from.
• Multimedia and the photobook. Work made for sequence and for the page, or combined with audio, where the single image is not the unit of meaning.

Finding your way around

The talks archive lists every profile by date, which is the quickest route if you remember roughly when someone presented. The archive by year groups the same pages across 2017 to 2020 and is better for browsing a period. Thematic pieces on subjects like the photo essay and diversity in British photojournalism sit alongside the individual profiles.

Corrections and removals

If you are one of the photographers written about here, these pages are built from publicly available information. You are welcome to ask us to update a profile, change a link, correct a detail or take the page down, and we will act on it without argument. Write to us through the contact page.

The same applies to anyone who spots an error. A description that was accurate three years ago may not be now, representation changes, projects get retitled and books go out of print, and we would rather hear about it than leave it wrong.