Ellen Dixon is a North East-based photographer whose eclectic work combines portraiture,
documentary and landscape forms in both analogue and digital media to produce an
intimate, ongoing journal of Newcastle’s LGBTQIA+ community. As a genderfluid person that
has witnessed first-hand the restricted opportunities for marginalised artists that have long
plagued the medium of photography, Ellen’s images and exhibitions are motivated by an
urgency to uplift those around them. They chronicle untold stories of everyday queer love
and collectivity, pleasure and care, joy and silliness.
A young Ellen frequently found themself lost in cinema, whose narrative dreams inspired
their early photographic passion for diarising the moments with family and friends that
shaped their adolescence in Whitley Bay. As their practice developed personally and
professionally, they discovered artists such as Nan Goldin and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, fellow
documentarians of the bonds and vernacular shared across subcultures.
While and after studying at Newcastle College, Ellen established multiple artistic
connections throughout the North East, collaborating regularly with queer musicians, fine
artists, filmmakers, producers and spaces. Vitally, these relationships have been founded on
friendship first, with Ellen’s devotion to those within the local scene animating the stories
that their photographs illuminate. This has informed their ever-evolving project ‘Queer in
Question’, a portrait series in conversation with Newcastle’s queer-identifying people that is
perhaps the most explicit articulation of their thematic interests thus far.
The mutability of their work and the multimedia it encompasses renders any overly
prescriptive statement of Ellen’s aesthetic ‘style’ reductive, potentially blunting its emotive,
sensual and affective potency. Nonetheless, there are certain recurring subjects and motifs.
Profiles of queer and trans people, their relationships and bodies celebrated but never
fetishised, are prominent: dancing hard and laughing harder; flaunting tattoos and serving
looks; hanging out and making out. States of transition – renovations; gentrification;
twilight; travelling carnivals; bustling streets, costumes donned or discarded – proliferate;
glimpses of Ellen’s nurturing community and their evolving surroundings. Lives lived, living
and yet-to-be-lived.
Ellen’s photographs have been displayed in solo and collaborative exhibitions across the UK,
including London’s Gallery West (‘W.E.T.’, 2022); Newcastle’s Zerox (‘Efflorescence’, 2019),
Estate Tea (‘Hideous Glorious’, 2023) and Pink Lane Coffee (2022-2023); and Leeds’ North
Bar (2021) and Hyde Park Book Club (2021). Their diverse professional portfolio has included
freelance work for MUAs, stylists, musicians and more, shooting promo materials, album
covers and weddings across the North East. A true grassroots and DIY artist, they are an
ardent believer in the autonomy of self-publishing and artisanal processes such as
developing and printing their own work. Looking to share these skills more widely, they
hope to soon establish a collective photography workshop for women and LGBTQIA+ people
with a similar enthusiasm for digital and analogue photography, empowering otherwise
precarious and suppressed artists to find their creative voice with the medium.
CONTACT
Get in touch for hire, collaborations and print enquires