Suzie Howell Explores The Tension Between Human And Material

London-based photographer Suzie Howell is an aestheticist. Her personal work is a collection of abstract experiments with light, movement, and texture, contrasting the human form and the natural world with delicacy and softness.

Howell, who we’ve featured previously on IGNANT, often uses material and found objects as props or to drape her subjects in. She creates dreamy and lucid images that whilst being grounded in nature and reality, feel particularly other-wordly or from an era long ago. Howell thoughtfully curates each frame in a way that explores the inherent beauty of what she is photographing. “For me, photography is a way of driving out the thoughts and images that run through my mind”, she explained in an interview with Document Journal. “It’s what motivates me to keep trying new things within the medium”. If she can physically change the form of an object, then that is compelling to her. “I quite often like to manipulate and sculpt my subjects into something that is more abstract and personal”, she continues, because photography is “the only way I know how to express myself creatively”.