Sandy Connell

My name is Sandy and I’m a British photographer based in SE London, earning my money with video editing by day and spending it on analogue photography by night. In my IG takeover this week I’ll be talking about just three of the various strands of my BW photography work that will be on display at the @brockley_open_studios weekend on 6th and 7th July in an open-house exhibition of prints, zines and other photographic works that is a collaboration between myself and my two cousins, Stan and Tim.

Today I’m presenting some of the work to come out of over a year of shooting the NU Sessions music jams in Deptford. My cousin, Stan ( @stannipher ), started shooting 35mm BW shots of the jams in May 2023 and I joined in in January 2024, quickly making the monthly jams the main focus of my efforts to cut loose and try new things as I embraced the difficulty and the chaos of live music photography over the past year. I made 16”x12” photographic prints of my jam shots, plus my choice of one of Stan’s finest, in the darkroom at PhotoFusion – a beautifully maintained, spacious and comfortable facility. Stan created his 12”x9.5” prints there, as well, giving us plenty to show at the exhibition, where we will launch the inaugural NU Sessions photo zine – shot by Stan, designed and edited by me.

Showing prints and putting zines in the hands of fellow Londoners is an important destination for our NU photos. Their greatest value on social media is showing off the vibrancy of the jams, giving some well-earned flattery to the musicians, and lightening the promotional load for NU’s organisers. But viewing these images on a phone can never compare to seeing them on a wall or the printed page.

As fellow member of PhotoFusion, @bobby.tsang.photography has said many times: PRINT YOUR WORK. It doesn’t matter if you spend a day in the darkroom or get digital prints made. The images want to be made physical.

Sandy here, back for the second part of my takeover. At the end of this week I’ll be hosting my second exhibition at the @brockley_open_studios weekend (6th and 7th July) in SE London, showing prints made in the PhotoFusion darkroom alongside self-published photo zines and other collaborations with my cousins, Stan and Tim. Today’s takeover shows the first results of the as-yet-untitled double exposure family travel photography project that my cousin Tim devised. It smashes together exposures from our home turfs in London and Berlin with adventures in Bavaria, Istanbul, Japan and the Vercors.

This past Spring, Tim, Stan and I each shot two rolls of BW film on our separate trips, then exchanged them and reloaded them to add new exposures to what was already recorded on the film. In so doing, we created these double images in-camera with no specific instructions shared between the three of us – just some broad rules around framing and under-exposure, and agreements on who would create abstract exposures and who would shoot “distinct” objects. Sceptical, even reluctant, at first, I soon found that the naïveté of shooting this way is a feature, not a bug. I was freed and enlivened by dedicating time to shooting images that would be written over in places and ways I couldn’t anticipate.

When looking at the 6”x4” prints and scans that I got from PhotoFusion, the clash and interaction of disparate times and places drew unexpected ideas and associations out of me, prompting self-examination about the nature of travelling, leaving things to chance, relinquishing control, and the unpredictability of memory (I could write for hours about the thoughts this project has provoked on false, foggy, combined, shared, second-hand and lost memories).

The complete set of 200+ 6”x4” digital prints will be presented at our exhibition in an old French wine box with hand-written excerpts from our travel journals. Visitors will be encouraged to be hands-on and dig through the box for inspiration. It’ll be like treasure hunting in a second-hand shop in a gallery in a living room.

This is Sandy, back for my final takeover post. This post is about HELL. Thanks to PhotoFusion, I made my first large fibre-based print in the darkroom and was able to put it on public display as part of the annual PhotoFusion members’ exhibition. To show HELL 1, the leader of this series (first image above), in a public setting gave me a great personal boost for a project that has languished on the backburner since I shot these landscapes in 2022. I count the images from HELL among my best work but have also struggled with profound disappointments and often wondered if I have bitten off more than I can chew with my ambition to follow up what I already have with bigger, more refined shots, and turn HELL into an epic, infernal photo book. 

Between the creation of my first fibre-based prints and the members’ exhibition, I had the distinct pleasure of presenting my first prints of the HELL images to the members’ Saturday Sessions, which meet on the first Saturday of every month to display and discuss each other’s’ work. It is the perfect forum in which to draw inspiration and welcome valuable reactions to your work, as well as asking advice on methods and techniques that you’d like to try. But showing work there is not a pre-requisite. Turning up to observe is participation enough. And there is great warmth, friendship and support to be found in a room full of fellow photographers who have also endured THE PAIN of creating work in this multifaceted discipline.

I will soon be sharing more work from my HELL series via Instagram and my website www.sandyconnell.photography as I get warmed up to making more prints and finally diving into Phase Two of this big project. Meanwhile, both of my first two HELL prints will be on display at the @brockley_open_studios weekend in the densely packed exhibition that I am sharing with my cousins, Stan and Tim, at 35 Cranfield Road (right near Brockley station) on 6th and 7th July.

If you’re reading this line, then thank you for sticking with me through my lengthy posts!

Images © Sandy Connell.