As part of my degree with UAL, one of my assignments had us working directly with The National Portrait Gallery, in line with their Taylor Wessing Prize in 2025. Since the National Portrait Gallery felt they weren’t reaching as wide an audience as they could, my task was to find a way to connect new, underrepresented audiences with the gallery and engage them with the opportunities it offered.

At the National Portrait Gallery, amongst the portraits displayed as part of the Taylor Wessing collection, photographers were musing on working in male-dominated spaces, such as Hollie Fernando with her image entitled ‘Boss Morris’. The images in the Taylor Wessing collection demonstrate how each photographer can channel their experiences into their work, but how well known is this within underrepresented communities? So my solution is to properly integrate the gallery’s ethos with one particular underrepresented community.

In this series, I focused on photographing young carers in their respite settings. The aim was to showcase them as they are, rather than simply put them in the box of ‘young carers’, especially given that I was a young carer myself during my adolescence. Captured on both Polaroid film and my digital camera, the kids playing, interacting, and simply being free to be kids are showcased. If I speak from personal experience, those years when you are a young carer can spark a lot of anxiety when it comes to putting yourself first. Hopefully, this will intrigue new audiences within these communities with the opportunities the NPG offers. We bring the Taylor Wessing Prize to them, not the other way round.

After sending out pitch decks to intrigue any organisations that support young carers, the Southwark branch of Imago Community was the one that pulled through in the end. Their project manager, Angela, was my point of contact with the organisation, and she selected young carers who’d previously worked with photographers via Imago and expressed an interest in the arts. We both agreed this’d be a fantastic way to show the kids a potential future for themselves, given the trajectory I’ve gone on myself as a young carer.  


One of my visual influences for Young Carers & Me was Ewan Spencer’s series of images entitled One Night in Watford, which were used as promo images for the teen drama Skins (2006-2011). Spencer's photography was staged to look like documentary photography, and each of his images provides immediate insight into the group's dynamics, which were then fully explored in Skins itself. Spencer's photography places the camera as a quiet observer on the periphery of moments that demonstrate character. In this case, the quasi-documentary photography served as a good foundation for my proper documentary work, in which I walked around snapping images of the kids when they weren’t posing or performing, but were existing.


The kids I photographed were invited to create a mind map of all the words they associate with being young carers. Their mind map was digitised/scanned at the darkroom facilities on my university campus and then superimposed onto the final images. Hence, the children’s actual handwriting and words appear on the images, adding an extra layer of insight into these young carers' souls, drawing directly on photographer Wendy Ewald's approach to photography as a social practice. Part of my assignment involved installing my work as part of the marketing campaign to draw underrepresented audiences to the National Portrait Gallery. My installation invites other young carers to contribute handwritten notes centred around the theme of ‘family’. This’ll contribute to forming a growing, collective archive of care, aligning with the aims of bringing the Taylor Wessing Prize to underrepresented communities. Marketing at the very venues they frequent. The tagline for my campaign, “Write your answers here...”, doubles as a call to action during the exhibition to encourage the gallery audience to participate and as a tagline for posters and other marketing materials.