Nicola Muirhead- Inspiration

Nicola Muirhead is a documentary photographer and visual storyteller, and she specialises in social documentary style and portraiture. For her studies, she graduated with a BA in international studies and a minor in conflict resolution from her college in North Carolina. Almost all of her major projects focus on identity and place, and how people are impacted by political, environmental and social factors. In Bermuda, where she was born, she worked for the newspaper there for two years as a freelance photojournalist, with two documentary works shown in the Bermuda national gallery on drug addiction and hunger in Bermuda. While there, she worked with two non-profit organisations, and received a grant from the Bermuda arts council. Muirhead finished her masters in documentary photography and photojournalism at the University of the arts London, in 2017 and is now mostly based on London, the place where she is still working on her long term project ‘In Brutal Presence’.

I first found out about Muirhead when she came into our University to do a talk with some other photographers, to talk us through her style and body of work, but also the industry and what it’s like to be a professional photographer, and how to get there. The project that really caught my attention is called ‘In brutal presence’, specifically the work on Trellick Tower. The project itself focuses on the realities surrounding social housing in London and the impact of gentrification of urban communities. For this project, Muirhead started with Trellick Tower, as the tower itself has such a rich history in Kensington, as well as the people who live there, and their views on the tower and surrounding areas, but also on the future, as there are plans to possibly regenerate the area. She became quite friendly with a lot of the residents, some of whom have lived there for many years. When she felt the time was right to do so, she interviewed these residents and talked to them in great depth about their experiences in the tower, their thoughts on social housing, the impact of regenerating and rebuilding communities, and also what they think their future could hold. After interviewing them, she took portraits of the residents to go alongside the interviews, as a way for people to link a person to the story. I really like the series within the Trellick project about ‘Molly’, a 19 year old girl who lives in the tower, she speaks positively about her life living there as she grew up in the tower, she’s proud to say she lives there. As for the images, I like the portrait of her by herself with her cat, I really like the cooler tones of the photograph, and the way the light is leading, coming in through the window. Her pose is good too, it’s very natural as she’s looking out of the window, but it links to her paragraph, because she says how she loves the view and likes leaving her window open in the winter, so by her leaning over and looking out, it connects the two nicely. I also enjoy the trio of images of her cutting a man’s hair, it’s very natural, not staged in any way, and visually I like the tones of the image, it’s cool toned, but not so cold the viewer feels separated from the image. The pop of colour from the red covering also brings another element to the photograph that I like.

Another set I like is based off of ‘Fatouma’ a thirty year old lady who lives on the 30th floor. In her interview she talks about moving to London from Morocco in 1974, and initially she hated living in Trellick, but she had no other choice. She talks a lot about her family, her son, who she moved in Trellick with, and her husband, who moved to America, so she didn’t feel very safe in the tower. However now, she loves it, and likes the area. For her photographs, I really like all three of them. The portrait shows her sitting closer to the camera, on her sofa, facing the large windows, and I really like how bright and warm everything is, it shows it’s a home that’s been lived in for a long time, like there’s a warmth radiating from it. The last one shows a book that looks religious, on a stand on the table, and I like this photograph because it tells her story, how she favours her religion and how important it is to her, but also, how she still connects to her roots, even though she moved away from her home country she’s keeping bits with her.

Muirhead’s work connects quite a lot with my own, because it’s all about making connections within a community and being able to talk to people, and get the truth about a place you as a photographer don’t know too much about. She interviewed each subject, got to know them and then photographed them based on this, and while I don’t have such a long period of time to do this, it’s similar to what I’m doing for my shoot. I want to talk to people who actually live in the area, and get their views on the community there, how the community centre benefits the locals etc and Muirhead’s work inspires me to take the time and talk to these people to get their opinions, instead of just having the photographs.