Portsmouth is a port city on England’s south coast, and a growing hub for photography, with many talented people engaging with all formats of the medium.
Our Photography Champion in Portsmouth is Karl Bailey, is working with a steering group made up of professionals from Aspex, UOP and Pompey Darkroom to establish needs of the photography community in Portsmouth. Karl has identified an appetite amongst the community towards a more critical discourse around photography, with Aspex and Pompey Darkroom leading this through a programme of talks and exhibitions.
Karl Bailey is the founder and director of Pompey Darkroom, a visual arts organisation enabling photographers and artists, aspiring and existing, to consider photography as a way to critically engage with the world. In the Summer of 2025, Bailey successfully received Arts Council funding to build a darkroom in the heart of the city centre.
About Karl Bailey
Karl Bailey is an artist and photographer based in Portsmouth, UK. His practice explores the friction between one’s social environment and identity, which is informed by the artist’s own working-class upbringing. His work oscillates between conceptual and documentary approaches, using photography as a tool to demystify the complexities of place. This involves observing and capturing the political and economic shifts of his locality to interrogate the role of class, history, and culture that has shaped the community’s social infrastructure.
Through this sustained investigation, he reveals how structural forces are imprinted upon the most intimate aspects of an individual’s reality, establishing a dialogue between belonging, memory and social conditions. Personal memory is often intertwined with a post-documentary methodology. Bailey explores familial heritage and philosophical concepts of hauntology and temporal existentialism, ultimately making sense of one’s constructed identity by amalgamating layers of personal and past experiences.
