Emily is a photography graduate from Nottingham Trent University 2019, living in Wakefield she has brought her passion for photography home and made huge changes to the creativeness of the public in Wakefield, setting up Wakefields only darkroom. Working at the Art House and being part of the merry collective (Wakefield based art collective) is another aspect to Emily's career as a photographer, expanding herself into all areas of the creative community has helped her to build a creative network in order to have spaces to work, present and survive as a freelance artist.
As well as being a programmer, producer and educator she still creates freelance work. Involving photography and performance together, describing her practice as performing for the camera.
The three pillars of her practice are:
-Non exploytavie photography
-Co-production
-Connectivity, hearing peoples stories.
With these three parts she explores personal stories in a dramatised documentary approach. Using her bronica 645 her work is created with her pressing the shutter once everything she wants is visualised in the frame. Majority of her work is around her own health problems which she has been tackling for a lot of her life with her mother, perfuming in isolation with herself and the documentary device (the camera). One of the projects is called 'The Moors - Walking on fine lines'.
Spilt milk is a project that visualises Emily's personal story about the female health care in the NHS. Having a chronic illness and her huge frustration towards societies responses as 'she doesn’t look ill' encouraged the making of this project. Visualising the invisible, turning a memory into print.
Burial is another project on the same medical concept, where she collected all of her medical notes, then in the moors she buried the notes in a acknowledge of them. The main reason she is so attracted to the moors for her personal work is because she loves the connotations of the moors. The bleakness and feeling of connectivity as a women there empowers her.
Also during lock down Emily created a self-published print at home zine. She published the zine freely allowing others to print her work at home, how they would like it (whatever material, paper stock, sequence and more) and this grew the project due to the accessibility, and removing the cost barrier. She wants to make print accessible and she achieved this.
'You get conditioned into thinking photography cane only do so much.' ~ Emily Ryalls
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