Collaboration sits at the heart of my practice as both an educator and a practitioner, fundamentally shaping how I design and deliver work across photography, healthcare, and community contexts.

Through NHS Darkroom, I work closely with healthcare professionals to create genuinely shared spaces for reflection, dialogue, and image-making. These are not passive or observational environments; they are active, participatory processes in which individuals are recognised as creative collaborators, bringing their own experiences, insights, and voices to a collective exploration of care, wellbeing, and professional identity. This work is deeply reliant on the presence of a highly skilled and committed team in Photography, whose generosity, expertise, and attentiveness make it possible to sustain such open, responsive, and meaningful collaboration.

This collaborative approach extends into curriculum development, including the design of an upcoming interdisciplinary medical elective placement, where students engage with photography as a reflective and communicative tool within NHS Darkroom. It also informs my personal work, such as the exposure and darkroom workshops delivered as part of the ‘Our Freedom’ project with young people through Future Arts Centres and Berwick Youth Project. In his book On Freedom, Timothy Snyder frames freedom as the capacity to act meaningfully with others, supported by structures, care, and trust. Freedom, in this sense, is not the absence of constraint, but the presence of conditions that allow people to participate, contribute, and be heard.

Across these contexts, I prioritise co-authorship, active participation, and the creation of inclusive environments in which individuals feel confident to contribute, experiment, and reflect. Collaboration, for me, is not simply a method or a strategy; it is a deeply held value and a way of working that recognises and elevates the richness of different forms of knowledge, experience, and voice.

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