Lesley Farrell

Perennial Gardens

This series includes images of tools and household items found, over time, on my allotment, some no longer functional and some that I continue to use. The smaller items are carefully arranged in groups, as if staging a formal portrait and shot on the site where they have been found. 

Allotments, as spaces that commonly exist on the peripheries of towns and cities, represent, for many users, an escape from an urban lifestyle. They are also places where items from the city that have outlived their original function are collected and recycled, this process of regeneration mirroring the perennial nature of allotment life and produce.  They are both communal and private spaces. Whilst users may mark out their territories, allotment tenants are temporary occupants, nothing is owned, and everything is passed on and reused until items eventually decay.

In the most recent images I have combined the man-made artefacts with animal structures also found on the same allotment.  I am interested in the coexistence of the natural and man-made in our urban spaces, and the constant cycle of rebirth, reuse and decay. Photography provides a unique medium to explore this relationship, the still image interrupting the cycle, in a would-be attempt to stall the passage of time.

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Catherine Jacobs

Visionary architect Jan Gehl stresses that “lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities can be strengthened immeasurably by increasing the concern for pedestrians, cyclists and city life in general”

Created from small everyday objects, without the use of digital manipulation, In Proximity is an ongoing series of unpopulated, high-rise urban landscapes. Hovering between image and sculpture, reality and fiction, this ambiguity perhaps allows space to contemplate how architecture and ways of moving through cities influence the way we feel.

In Proximity

In Proximity

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Phillipa Klaiber

'Last of the Free Miners' is an on going project documenting the few remaining Free Miners of the Forest of Dean. The practice itself is no different to conventional mining; it is the traditions of eligibility combined with the modernisation of such an industry that make it so unusual. The mines that remain today are hidden away within the forest, each worked by two or three men. As a whole, the series endevours to document the working lives of the Free Miners and their Forest, exploring both recent changes in the landscape and those made hundreds of years ago in the ancient iron mines that have since been reclaimed by the forest. In our society of vast industrial and commercial growth, the Free Miners of the Forest of Dean represent a more traditional way of life that is easily forgotten.

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Owen Harries

Wales was once a country famous for its industry, the south in particular being home to countless factory and mining towns, but in recent years these industrial hubs have all but disappeared. Port Talbot, where these images were taken, is the last true industrial Welsh town. A blight on the horizon, and unavoidable point on the M4 corridor, it holds a strange place in every Welshman's identity. A place everybody passes but nobody ventures into, I have chosen to document this town, the industry surrounding it, and it's effect on the natural landscape.

Derelict Warehouse, Briton Ferry

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John Trickey

'on the edge' is my Final Year Project on the BA(Hons) Photography at the University of West London, Ealing, London

This defines the abstract edge created between the rural and urban, using the symbolism of man-made objects within the construct of the scene.

The project reflects upon personal issues spent living on this edge - liberty and confinement - and the movement not only between the two, but discovering the liminal point where the moment and movement exists between life and death.

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Gideon Vass

This project is a study into the suburban areas of south Manchester. The main focus is the relationship between people and place, how the structures and obstacles within this environment interact and obscure the view of the figure. I often direct the camera towards the household, the concern being how people act in their comfortable and immediate surroundings and what they are willing to expose to the outside world. Through these observations I aim to highlight the interplay between human actions and architectural arrangement.

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Rupert Howe

These images, the second of which was selected for the ESPY Award, form part of a continuing photographic essay which takes as its starting point the boundary of the Cotswolds AONB, the largest of the UK's Areas Of Outstanding Natural Beauty, designated 1966 and expanded 1990, as it skirts the perimeter of Stroud in Gloucestershire.

Running along footpaths, roads and parish boundaries, and marked on the AONB's interactive official map as an unbroken thick red line, the actual margin turns out to be a variegated interzone – or “edgeland” – cluttered with rural-urban motifs which challenge long-standing conventions of beauty and the sublime: untrimmed hedgerows, collapsed fences, walled-off private gardens, knotted tree stumps, angled telephone poles, the glistening steel tracery of the Cheltenham-Paddington railway.

Initially presented as a slideshow with an audio soundtrack, the project will continue to evolve across a variety of media and exhibition spaces.

Standish Woods

Stroud Bus Depot

Thrupp Lane

The Camp

Conygre Wood

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Dan Mariner

"I am a documentary photographer living and working in London, England. I Studied a BA in Documentary photography at the world-renowned Newport University in South Wales.

My personal reportage highlights underlying social issues and culture around us. I am a photographer of people, exploring how their lives interconnect with and shape their communities. As time goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more intrigued with the anthropological side of photography and aim convey this in my future work.

I am particularly interested in communities and individuals on the edge of society; communities whose contribution to society is hidden from the gaze of the mainstream media. I endeavour to use photography to highlight them with sensitivity, empathy and integrity. For me, photography is the perfect medium to convey stories and provide insights into the lives of others. I would like to think that through my photographs I can engender greater understanding and promote greater tolerance of the people and the world that we live in. I hope that this ideal and my passion will fuel my work for many years to come. To date, my subjects have included: Urban bee keeping, Young Carers, Organic Farming Communities, Political Refugees and Community- led Food Bank Initiatives. 

I am a highly motivated, energetic and creative individual constantly seeking to push myself in my photographic practice. When undertaking a new photographic essay I seek to work outside my comfort zone in terms of who I approach to photograph and how my work will be perceived by the viewer. With each new body of work I undertake I always look to convey something poignant, as I feel photography can provide such powerful messages using only a small number of images. Through my work to date I have developed excellent listening and communication skills, sensitivity, empathy, patience and on the spot problem solving abilities. I am very confident in embracing new situations and environments. I enjoy a challenge and am willing to work extremely hard to gain the results I desire.

I find inspiration from the likes of David Chancellor, Alec Soth, Zed Nelson, Michael Wolf and Mark Power."

High Rise Honey

High Rise Honey is a celebration of the urban beekeepers at The London School of Economics. I followed the ecology department as they prepared the apiary for winter hibernation and collected this summers golden harvest.

As urban bee keeping is becoming an increasingly popular trend among city dwellers and businesses who seek to bring a rural twist to fast pace urban life. I set out to photograph the capitals high altitude beekeepers who promote this vital skill, while remaining largely unseen from the gaze of the public.

High Rise Honey

High Rise Honey

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Featured Photographer: Justine Sawicz

As well as featuring photographers from ESPY 2014, we will also be celebrating emerging photographers from all over the world. Justine Sawicz is our first, born in Canada and studying in Carmarthen, we are all big fans of her work and very excited to see her progress...

"Up until February 2014, I had never taken a photography class before in my life. Within a semester abroad to study art at Colleg Sir Gar in Carmarthen, Wales, I had gone from complete photographic ignorance to a greater understanding, appreciation and affinity to the medium.

My fascination with photography had been more of a tinkering effort to take good photos. It had been easy for me to gravitate to the camera and take "good" photos. But, I found my true calling with film photography when I tried it here in Wales. More specifically, I taught myself how to double expose on film and have made this my signature effect in this book. It is the unpredictability, surprise and challenge of taking double exposures that fuels my passion for it. All these photographs have been solely on 35 mm film. They include pictures of my friends that I have met during my exchange in Wales, self-portraits, nature, architecture and anything I've found to be unexplainably inspiring during my travels. I hope that they capture my fascination with the mystical spirit of the nature in Wales, the haunting and gothic beauty that I see in the landscape, ridden with legends, stories, and history as well as the beauty I find in the crippled, shrivelled, decayed, dying, resurrected, blossoming, and the impermanence of life.

I try to maintain a natural quality to my photographs, using only natural lighting for every image without any post-editing besides photo cropping and lightening the exposure.

Below are some photos I've included in a series called, Theomorphic (literally meaning being formed in the likeness or image of God), I am commenting on the fact that I create my life the same way I create these images, metaphorically speaking. The beauty that I create in my photographs, is the same beauty I can create in my life with my thoughts, actions and decisions.

It is coming to Wales to study art that has brought me to produce these photos. But it is coming to Wales that has also brought me to produce innumerable experiences, life long friends and memories that I will cherish and remember for a many lifetimes. I believe that my external world is God. I see God, the Universe, however you refer to it, in everyday life. In everything I see. Particularly in people, nature and our creations. And this is how I find the respect and beauty in life and approach it with a liveliness, vivaciousness and childish excitement every day."

James Elliott Dixon

"I am interested in art that can realise the extrasensory, humanise the abstracts of the macrocosm and the microcosm and defamiliarise the known.  My work and research to date has centred on the consideration of landscape as a medium through which to represent or allude to these larger physical or metaphysical zones. Through this immanence I hope to address the spiritual in a way that is relevant to a secular age.

I believe that grounding these vast concepts in the language of the everyday does not diminish them, on the contrary, these associations are necessary to re-enchant our experience of the world and to confront complacency.  Through an equal recognition of darkness/light, silence/sound, stillness/movement I hope to achieve a more lucid experience of space and time."

Between the Darkness

Black Pool

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