200 - Emma Hardy

A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

Based in London, Emma Hardy is well practiced in capturing the nuances of everyday life. Her images reflect an often unnoticed drama behind the scenes. Coming from a theatrical background and having worked as an actress herself before focusing on photography, Emma cites her fascination with people’s behaviour, the tensions, interactions and quirky humour, as a driving energy in her work.

Mainly self-taught, Emma photographs on film, simply, with natural or available light, stating “I try not to impose much technique or too much of myself on my subjects.” As such, there’s a hallmark honesty to her work. Her images are infused with a believable sense of being, her portraits are intimate and unselfconscious. Tilda Swinton, Natalia Vodianova, Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender and Stella McCartney have sat for her, among others.

She started photographing portraits, documents and fashion for British Vogue, The Telegraph magazine, Vanity Fair, The Fader, The New York Times and Rolling Stone, among many others, and had her first solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 with a project titled Exceptional Youth. Other exhibitions in London, New York and Milan followed, and she was invited to photograph a series of portraits for the London 2012 Olympics, again featured at the National Portrait Gallery. Thirty-nine of her portraits are in the permanent collection at the NPG London. In 2012 she was commissioned by Oxfam & The Economist to travel to Cambodia to document the citizens of Phnom Penh who were battling the governments land grabs—this series became an exhibition in London in 2013 titled Losing Ground, the exhibition travelled to Washington DC where the images were used as a lobbying tool to help the Cambodian situation onto the G8 summit list.

Permissions, Emma’s first monograph, was published by Gost Books in November 2022. Some of the images were exhibited at 1014 Gallery in Dalston, London, December 2022 - January 2023.

Describing her aesthetic as raw but tender, Emma finds beauty in imperfection, and polish in the detail of everyday life. And through her lens, the most ordinary moments seem steeped in romance and intrigue, as if her subjects are characters in a movie playing in her head.

On episode 200, Emma discusses, among other things:

• Is art more pure if it’s done for the joy of it?
• Beauty and lyricism
• Childhood feelings of being an outsider
• Taking pictures of her children from an early age
• Trying to transmit how she felt in her work
• The inclusion of still lifes of flowers
• Why she started to photograph her mum
• The issue of permission and consent
• How the way she shot changed over time

Referenced:

• Nan Goldin
• Richard Billingham
• Nick Waplington
• Vivian Maier
• 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
• Stuart Smith
• Stephen Ledger-Lomas
• Niall Sweeney

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“When things line up, when life or the universe says ‘I’ve got something I can show you. Are you ready? ARE you ready?’ And you might be ready, and you might catch this thing that is shown to you. And that’s incredibly beautiful. And the times that that has happened I was very aware of it. Like, my whole body started fizzing.”

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