Newport / Lab

Clémentine Schneidermann

Clémentine Schneidermann is a French photographer based between Wales and France. She is interested in new approaches in documentary photography through engagement and creativity. She published her first monograph, I Called her Lisa Marie in 2018 (Chose Commune) created over a five-year period between Memphis and South Wales focused around the figure of Elvis Presley. Since 2015, she has been working on a collaborative and participatory project with art director Charlotte James and children living in the South Wales Valleys. This hybrid project was first shown at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol in 2019 and is also part of Clementine's practice-based PhD started at the University of South Wales in 2016. Clementine also regularly collaborates with fashion magazines such as Vogue Italia, Dazed and Self Service alongside her personal projects.

Fergus Thomas

Fergus Thomas is a British photographer based in London. He makes long-term photographic projects, predominantly on the intersection between nature and culture. His project ‘Colville’ was published in Granta magazine, long-listed for the Magnum graduate Award, exhibited at Warsaw Photo-Days, in Poland, and in the Ian Parry scholarship exhibition in London.

He received his BA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales, Newport and his MA in Photography from the University of the West of England. Alongside his practice, he works professionally, completing commissions and assignments. Clients include The Telegraph magazine, Four Paws International and The Wall Street Journal.

Daragh Soden

Daragh Soden is an artist, photographer and director from Dublin, Ireland currently working in London and in Europe. His work explores universal themes that affect him Personally. This approach to his art places specific, personal experience within the context of the universal. Using mainly still images, but also moving-image, prose and poetry, Soden’s art practice could be described as a kind of search for a greater truth. He sees his role as an artist as one to question existing social structures and to invite others to do the same. Soden’s Young Dubliners series, a combination of environmental portraits and diaristic text, has been exhibited in Dublin, London and Paris. In 2017, he was awarded the Grand Prix du Jury at the prestigious Hyères Fashion and Photography Festival. In 2018, he exhibited a new work, Tales of Toulon, at the Villa Noailles in Hyères and in Toulon, France. In 2019, Soden exhibited Looking for Love in The Photographers’ Gallery in London. A series of analogue photographs, lightboxes and a super8 film, Looking for Love was part of the group exhibition Shot In Soho including work by artists William Klein, Anders Petersen and Corinne Day.

Lua Ribeira

Lua Ribeira is a Galician photographer based in the UK. Her practice is characterized by its collaborative nature, extensive research and an immersive approach to her subject matter. She is interested in using the photographic medium as a means to create encounters that establish relationships and question structural separations between people. Ribeira graduated in Graphic Design at BAU School of Design, Barcelona in 2011, and received a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales in 2016. Ribeira’s work has received the Firecracker Grant for Women in Photography, the Jerwood/Photoworks award and has been nominated for the Prix Pictect 2019 and Foam Paul Huf award. Her work has been published in book form by Fishbar, London in 2017, and was featured in the publication Firecrackers: Female Photographer Now published by Thames and Hudson in 2017, and in Raw View Magazine, “Women looking at Women” 2016. Since 2018 she has been represented by Magnum Photos agency.

Bandia Ribeira

Bandia Ribeira Cendán is a Galician photographer based in Almeria, Spain. She graduated in Political Science, and later received a BA in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales, Newport. During the course in Newport she worked on two projects in Wales: “Tiger Bay”, which was exhibited at Diffusion Festival 2015 as part the exhibition “A Tale of Two Cities”; and she also produced a self-published book entitled “Life is great, without it you'd be dead” in 2014 consisting of photographs taken in the areas of Newport and Port Talbot. In recent years she has been working as an educator and has also been developing a new photographic project in Almería, a province in southeastern Spain that is known for its export-oriented industrial vegetable production.

Sebastián Bruno

Sebastián Bruno is an Argentine/Spanish photographer and film-maker. Based on his own individual and collective experiences, together with a strong responsibility to both place and people, Sebastian’s personal practice intends to understand and explore the complexity of human relations within its political, historical and social context. To interpret the world, communities and people who may have been passed by in the name of progress, is what provides him with the means to create authentic and charged narratives that go beyond the boundaries of traditional documentary practice.

His first monograph Duelos y Quebrantos was shortlisted for the Prix du Livre d’auteur at Le Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles in 2018. More recently his documentary The Dynamic was nominated for a BAFTA Cymru Breakthrough award.

Isaac Blease

Isaac Blease is a photographer and curator based in Bristol, UK. He graduated in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales in 2015 and completed an MA in Curating at the University of the West of England in 2018. His project Charaxes Imperialis about the butterfly collection bequeathed to him by his Grandfather was the recipient of the Deutsche Bank DBACE art & photography award in 2017. This project was also shortlisted for the Magnum Graduate photography award in 2016, and the Photoworks/Jerwood award in 2017. He has worked on a number of curatorial projects including; Empire Through the Lens in 2017-18 (Bristol Museum and Art Galleries), Alone With Empire 2018-19 (IC Visual Lab, Format Photo Festival, Getxo Photo Festival Bilbao), and most recently Island Life: Photographs from the Martin Parr Foundation in 2021 (Bristol Museum and Art Galleries / Bristol Photo Festival). He is currently the collections manager at the Martin Parr Foundation.

Michael Alberry

Michael Alberry is a photographer currently based in Bristol, UK. His photographic work explores and compares the ways humans seek meaning through culture, leading him through themes of ritual, spirituality, and crowd psychology. His series ‘A Time to Dance’ (2014-ongoing), draws on the parallel between dance and prayer, exploring a correspondence of gesture and ritual in the weekly meetings of churches and nightclub dance floors. His series ‘Every Cross on Cross mountain’, is a typological series of sculpture-like crucifixes, constructed by hand on the mountainside pilgrimage site of Križevac, in Medugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He holds a BA in Documentary Photography from University of Newport, South Wales. He is currently undergoing an MA in photography at the University of West of England, Bristol.