Nicola Bensley is a photographer whose penetrating gaze on the world is most frequently captured on film and in black and white. Probably best known for her portrait work (a recent project on contemporary artists includes studies of Frank Auerbach and Maggi Hambling), Bensley also documents private worlds (the Convent Series) as well as inventing worlds of her own, currently in an ongoing collaboration with a contemporary dancer. After art school and an apprenticeship with an advertising photographer she spent some years as chief photographer for a newspaper group before leaving to pursue her own ideas. Her work seeks to draw out the extraordinary from the everyday, both through direct observation and from her own playful interventions. All her silver gelatin prints are made by the legendary printer Bob Wiskin.
Read her interview in the British Journal of Photography;
British Journal of Photography
Nicola Bensley's Portrait of Maggi Hambling was short listed for the Taylor Wessing portrait prize.
The image is getting high visibility in the Arts Press, used here to advertise a TATE event with Maggi Hambling.
TATE Event and a Sarabande event by The Art Newspaper