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Four photographers are tasked with bringing fine art photography into a new hospital.
These four films unpick the long process and careful thinking behind the image making.
The Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton is undergoing a historic redevelopment. As part of it, the Trust has commissioned a major body of new photographic work to help create a healing environment for patients and the public.
A sense of place and belonging underlies the four chosen themes — Sussex, South Downs, Brighton and Coast. The images will connect patients to local places, creating welcoming and reassuring waiting spaces which reflect the culture and identity of the hospital community.
These short films follow the trajectory of each photographic artist, as they respond to their creative briefs and navigate the challenges of creating work for a very sensitive environment.
Client: BSUH NHS Trust,
Agency: Photoworks, Willis Newson
Executive Producer: Emily Malins
Executive Producer: Shoair Mavlian
Producers: Alexandra Lethbridge,
Claire Wearn, Julia Bunnemann
Filmmaker: Vasil Dzhagalov
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Helen Sear
Drawn to examine the contrast between places in which nature is left to its own devices, and places where plants and landscapes have been carefully curated by human intervention, photographer Helen Sear spent two years exploring the gardens and landscapes of Sussex in the making of this portfolio.
Celine Marchbank
Taking the theme of ‘Brighton’, Celine Marchbank has created work that evokes and celebrates the sense of place that home brings. In a series of diverse, individual, and intimate portraits of people’s homes across Brighton and Hove, she captures a sense of familiarity, wellbeing and comfort.
Murray Ballard
Murray Ballard has lived in Sussex all his life. Many of the places he photographed for the South Downs series were already familiar to him and had strong personal resonances. His work offers an antidote to the urban environment and modern living. As the writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner wrote, “the idea of knowing that such places exist might be psychologically resourceful for us".
Zoe Childerley
Zoe Childerley has taken a dive into the coastal landscape – floating, paddling, sailing and walking with local communities – to create seascape imagery anchored in concepts of ‘beneath the waves’, ‘on the surface’ and ‘at the edge’. Having recently moved to the Sussex Coast, Zoe was interested in how living by the sea affects one’s sense of wellbeing.