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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Espy Installation Shots

James A. Hudson

All the images were taken during the last few auctions at the Livestock Market in the town centre of Abergavenny. The market had been a regular meeting point for the local urban and rural cultures for 150 years. It finally closed on 10th December 2013 following the sale of the site to William Morrison Supermarkets PLC by Monmouthshire County Council. 

These five images are from a series of 30 images taken on the last days of the old market and the first day of the new market at Bryngwyn.

The Escapee, 2014

Trailer Cleaning, 2014

Freedom, 2014 

Ghost Sheep, 2014

Shutting Up Shop, 2014

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Mikaela Toczek

Another Side of Existence

"As a little nursery child… sitting alone behind the nursery curtain to watch the great resplendent planet in the evening sky near sunset.  The wonder and deep admiration I felt was surely something quite outside me, coming from another side of existence, of which I knew nothing, only that it was enchanting."
Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, quoted in Mary T. Bruick, Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy: Stars and Satellites, (London: Springer, 2009), p. 117.

Thereza Dillwyn-Llewelyn (later Story-Maskelyne, 1834-1926), was the daughter of John and Mary Dillwyn-Llewelyn, the progressive Victorian family from Penllergare, near Swansea. She was a woman of many talents. Throughout her long life, Thereza’s interests spanned the sciences, politics, culture, and, importantly for this project, photography and astronomy, all of which she explored on her family’s estate. Indeed the landscaped Penllergare estate was designed as a place to ponder the picturesque, yet Thereza’s inquisitiveness drove her to look beyond such grounded beauty toward the boundless possibilities symbolized by the cosmos. This fascination with the ‘resplendent planet[s]’ encouraged her father John to build a magnificent observatory at Penllergare, and it was here, in 1858, that father and daughter collaborated to produce the now iconic - and at the time groundbreaking - photograph of the moon. Thereza was instrumental in the making of this image and it places her as an important figure in both astronomy and photography.  Ibid. p. 118.

Thereza Dillwyn-Llewelyn was a forward-thinking woman who strove relentlessly to look above and beyond her own horizons at a time when this was not the accepted norm for women.  Working in collaboration with the Penllergare Trust, Another Side of Existence forms part of an ongoing project that aims to bring this exceptional woman’s life back into focus. Both the observatory and the estate are currently being renovated, encouraging us to re-engage with Penllergare’s history and reconsider its relevance today. And though the windows of the observatory are fogged with almost 150 years of history, we are able capture fleeting glimpses of a distant historical moment.

Another Side of Existence, 2014

Another Side of Existence, 2014

Another Side of Existence, 2014

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