A group of eight young people have been interpreting and reimagining archaeology in their own lives and communities. The young people, aged 16-25, have been challenging traditional notions of heritage through their photography supported by award-winning artist Laura El-Tantawy.
As newcomers to archaeology, participants used their unique perspectives to explore the places, objects, and spaces that are significant to them.
They engaged with themes of identity, community, and representation and asked questions about relevance, interpretation, and curation: What makes something ‘heritage,’ or ‘archaeology’ and who decides?
Photography has provided a fresh perspective to explore these themes, offering participants the freedom to reinterpret archaeology and heritage in ways that speak directly to their own experiences.
Through their work, participants interrogated what constitutes heritage, exploring how we see ourselves reflected in archaeology and how we can foster a sense of belonging, ownership, and relevance for everyone.
Their photography reflects personal perspectives on archaeology and heritage, exploring how these concepts are relevant in their own lives and places.
Supporting emerging practice
Support for emerging artists is built into much of Photoworks Learning & Engagement work with young or emerging artists.
Our partnership with the Council for British Archaeology offers a further platform through which we are able to offer support. Input from professional archaeologists on a range of topics including space archaeology helped shape and inform the photography of these eight artists all interested in creative explorations of heritage.
Mentoring is a core element of this. Alongside artist-led group sessions participants received one-to-one support with different members of CBA and the Photoworks team on a range of practical topics such as how to write and manage a project budget, editing work for a final portfolio and careers advice.
Everyone’s needs, experiences and interests are unique, so tailoring our offer to match those is key to how we work.
We worked with participants to consider approaches to exhibiting their artwork and supported participants interested in community engagement to develop, test and review workshop ideas. For example running a photowalk at a heritage site as part of the Festival of Archaeology in Bradford.
Abigail Tinnion
Heirlooms
When fragments of the past are found in the modern world, how do we understand them? Can we ever understand them impartially? Heirlooms explores the liminal space between scientific impartiality and the spiritual significance that fragments of the deep past hold for our collective understanding of our heritage. The medium of photography, mirrors this liminal space, capturing a world that’s not quite fact or fiction.
Biography
I am a visual artist and folklorist working primarily in photography. My practice investigates folklore, mythology, and historical belief systems, especially regarding autonomy and oppression. Through my work, I explore identity and representation, particularly examining what defines the ‘inhuman’ and our relationship with ‘the other’, ancient cultures, animals, and the dead.
Adam Lin
I’ll Tell You All About It
I’ll Tell You All About It is a series of collages exploring family history, memory, and the passage of time across generations. At its core, the work is a love letter to my late grandmother, who passed away in 2021. After her passing, I discovered a small notebook she had kept for over 40 years-a personal record of her daily life, filled with brief but meticulous entries. She documented everything: the meals she shared with family, the exact weight of each grandchild at birth, the small expenses of everyday life, the clothes she bought for my grandfather, the times we visited her, and even the moments she was proud of us; like when I won a contest as a child or when I decided to move to London for university.
At first glance, these entries seemed purely practical, but as I read deeper, I realized they revealed something far more intimate. Between the numbers and brief sentences, there was a quiet, understated expression of love and devotion; an archive of her emotions, her pride in her family, her gratitude for the simple moments. She never wrote explicitly about how she felt, but the consistency of her recordings spoke volumes. Family was her whole world, and through her words, I came to understand just how deeply she cared for each of us, even in ways I had never noticed before.
Inspired by her journal, I created this series of collages using images exclusively from my family archive, blending old photographs with more recent digital images from my phone. By layering fragments of different moments, I explore the fluidity of time, how childhood fades into adulthood, how traditions evolve, how roles shift. The act of giving and receiving red envelopes during Lunar New Year, once something I experienced as a child, is now something I witness younger generations go through. Family members who were once children in these old photographs have now become parents themselves. My grandmother, who once held us in her arms, never got to meet some of the newest additions to our family.
These collages are my way of processing grief, reflecting on my relationship with her, and acknowledging her lasting impact on our family. The title, I’ll Tell You All About It, serves as both a personal and collective statement, on one hand, it speaks to all the things I wish I could share with my grandmother since she passed, and on the other, it invites the audience into this intimate act of remembrance. In piecing together these moments, I attempt to bridge the past and present, creating a visual language that honours the legacy of love and connection she left behind.
Biography
I am a Taiwanese image-maker and artist based in London. My practice explores the complex, often underrepresented experiences of masculinity and male intimacy within domestic spaces, emphasizing the intricate interplay of family dynamics, identity and personal history.
Ben Waters
Somewhere in There is My Voice
Somewhere in There is My Voice explores the ways in which find significance and engage with the life that precedes us. Highlighting photography both as an aid for memory but also as an unfixed record and tangible object, the images question the line between what is forgotten and what is preserved. Considering how we construct and find meaning in the writing of our own personal histories.
Biography
I am a photographic artist currently based in Wales. I most recently graduated with a BA Hons Photography from Arts University Bournemouth. Stemming from an initial interest in ancient belief, folklore and prehistory, over the last few years my practice has explored the ways in which we bestow significance and construct meaning from the environment through considering photography’s role as a record and questioning our engagement with the life that has preceded us.
Chagla Mehmet
Untitled
I’ve photographed places that hold personal and cultural significance to me across the UK and Cyprus. Growing up as a Cypriot in diaspora, I’ve often felt a tension between distance and belonging. For this project, I wanted to reflect on what heritage means when it’s shaped by displacement, memory, and emotion, rather than solely by place or tradition.
To explore this, I reintroduced archival photographs from my family albums, placing them in conversation with my recent images of landscapes and spaces connected to my heritage. I’m interested in how memory is preserved, altered, or even lost across generations, and how photography can be a way of bridging those gaps. These archival images act as visual traces of the past, and by incorporating them into new work, I aim to question how heritage continues to evolve.
I chose to work with cyanotypes because I’m drawn to their materiality and hands-on process. The deep blue of the print, paired with its unpredictability, mirrors the emotional and elusive nature of memory. Cyanotypes also give me the freedom to experiment—layering, reworking, and physically engaging with the surface of the image.
Through double exposure, I’ve printed my own drawings onto some of the cyanotypes. These lines serve multiple symbolic purposes: they act as roots, connecting different layers of time, and as stitches, binding past to present, presence to absence.
This work is both an emotional and material exploration of inherited identity. It reflects my desire to make sense of my heritage not just through imagery, but through the physical process of making. It’s a way of honouring the fragments, reconnecting what’s been separated, and acknowledging that heritage is not fixed—it’s something we continuously shape, question, and carry.
Biography
I am a Turkish Cypriot photographer based between Cyprus and the UK. My practice explores the intersection of land, memory, and identity, using analogue photography to reveal overlooked and forgotten narratives embedded within natural landscapes. Much like archaeology uncovers fragments of the past, my work aims to make visible the layers of human history that shape our understanding of place and belonging. The land itself serves as a silent witness, preserving imprints of trauma.
Elizabeth Wells
Untitled
When I first went to Lewes back when I was a kid, I was honestly kind of shocked by all the old architecture there, it’s not something you see in Brighton despite their closeness.
I felt the same when I started my current school, it felt like it should be a museum not an educational institute. I really enjoy older buildings especially the ones covered in greenery.
I often find it strange or embarrassing to photography archaeology that was once so closely lived in, I feel like I am often intruding into their day to day, but I also can’t help but stay interested in what it was like for them whether they shared similar experiences or imagining their reactions to what their homes are now used as.
Biography
I’m studying for my A Levels at a Waldorf Steiner School taking A Levels in Photography, History and Fine Art. My passion for history began when I was small, as I loved to sit for hours reading books about Ancient Greek and Norse mythology; usually with one of my cats curled up somewhere nearby. For many years I wanted to become an archaeologist, but as I got older, my passion for photography has become equally important to me.
Louie Haslam Chance
Untitled
This project is a personal and poetic response to the Bradford Beck; a hidden, often neglected waterway that runs through the heart of the city. I began photographing the Beck as I was drawn to its overlooked beauty and complex history, but as I walked its path, I found myself thinking more deeply about my own roots, memory, and emotional connection to this land.
The work took shape as a series of images quietly pairing black-and-white photographs of the Beck with handwritten captions drawn from reflections I wrote while looking through old family archives. Each caption is a fragment of memory; moments of care, conflict, grief, and unresolved emotion. In many cases, the words have no direct link to the photographs, yet together they create new meanings and connections.
Technically, the project also involves an environmentally mindful process. I shot the project on 35mm film which was then developed using a sustainable recipe (caffenol) and water gathered from various points along the Beck. This physical connection embeds the place directly into the material of the images, making the land a key part of the image-making process.
Ultimately, this project is about memory and how it’s connected to different physical spaces, and how the landscapes we live alongside can hold our histories. The project invites quiet reflection on the overlooked; both the buried river running beneath Bradford and the hidden emotions/memories held in family history.
Biography
I’m a photographer based in Bradford. My photographic practice heavily revolves around capturing the deeper meanings of a space, and using alternative photographic processes to connect to, and create a sense of place. I usually work through analogue techniques as I find this way of working more meditative, thoughtful, and magical when seeing negatives and prints coming to life.
Solomon Pui Chung Yu
Long D.
This is an ongoing project documenting my long-distance relationship with my girlfriend.
These photos allow me to reminisce our time together, the memories that we share, and the growth of our relationship. The same way as I flip through my family albums with portraits of my parents and putting the pieces of their past into a full story. These photos represent love, bitterness, aloneness, the longing for stability and perhaps the innocent crush that makes us want to spend the rest of our lives with someone special.
Each portrait is paired with an environmental landscape, borrowing the idea of diptychs to provide context of the places that we were in. The mundane setting is an honest and raw representation of ordinary life, focusing on the simple beauty that is around our daily lives and environments. The photos are shot on various media, both analogue and vintage digital.
As much as we identify ourselves by nationalities and ethnicities, we are also defined by the people that we surround ourselves with, our friends, family, and dearest ones. As a young person that left home before maturity and adulthood to a foreign country without family and friends, I struggle to define and identify myself to a singular origin. When I think about my heritage, I resonate with where I come from, but also this western world that I do not fully belong. I can only look to the constants in my life, which are people that I hold closest to.
My photography practice revolves around my personal life and finding details in the mundane. My creative process is different from my peers that have spent years in this industry. I am not used to creating with specific boundaries in mind. I used to consider my work insignificant beyond its aesthetics, however, through My Heritage, it made me realise how photographs are an important visual artefacts besides their artistic value. They reflect how we lived our lives, what we deemed important and the values that we cherished.
Biography
I am a London based photographer exploring themes of belonging, identity, and the interplay between modern technology and everyday life. I love to capture intriguing details in daily routines, experimenting with bright colours and compositions. Analogue and vintage digital are the two main mediums that I work with. Growing up in the shift from physical to digital media, I am always captivated by the chemistry behind a physical photograph. I wish to learn and preserve its tactile beauty.
Sophie Mann
Explorations
I really enjoy taking my camera out and about and photographing the places I go and the things I see. I love looking for patterns and perspective, particularly in architectural spaces.
Biography
I am 17 years old and currently in full-time education. I have a passion for photography as I can capture moments and allow people to see things from my perspective. I love looking back on my photos to remember how I felt and be able to tell stories about that moment in time. Photography is something that is accessible as even though I am in a wheelchair it gives me a reason to get out and about and enjoy exploring.
Since 2021, Photoworks and the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) have collaborated to champion innovative ways of engaging new audiences with archaeology and heritage.
In October 2024, with support from members of the CBA’s Youth Advisory Board, we recruited eight young people to participate in the project. Our young photographers have a variety of lived experiences and perspectives, huge enthusiasm for the project, and have been eager to explore their practice through the theme of archaeology and heritage.
This project is made possible with support from the National Lottery Fund thanks to National Lottery players. It is part of the CBA’s Reconnecting Archaeology programme.
