Thomas Sussex is a documentary and portrait photographer living and working in London.
The images he makes attempt to render an individual social reality that carries political weight. His process often attempts to navigate that which falls outside of expected photographic reportage, to encompass symbolic gestures and abstracted scenarios.
Sussex graduated the Ba Hons Photography Degree at the University of the South West of England in 2014. His graduation project titled ‘Our Sincere Toils’ and was awarded the South West Graduate Prize 2014 by Fotonow CIC and lead to a long term funded commission photographing an economically deprived area of Bristol City, U.K. In 2015 Sussex’s ‘Our Sincere Toils’ series documenting the Ukrainian revolution was published in book form by Australian publishing house Bloom Publishing and was featured as Dazed Digitals most exciting new photography books in July 2015.
Sussex’s work has been published both online and in print internationally and he’s exhibited prints on multiple occasions throughout Europe.
Three years ago Sussex moved to London to pursue a career as a freelance photographer as has a high profile list of clients including FT Weekend, Crack Magazine, BBC Online, Splash and Grab Magazine, Vice, Dazed Digital, Fotofilmic, Luna Collective, Huck Magazine amongst others.
In his recent project titled ‘Pathway trace’ he seeks to record a neighboring European culture with a quiet mind documenting this foreign reality almost thirty years after the fall of Yugoslavia and the bloody Bosnian war.
Sussex’s process incorporates the use of analog cameras and found objects and imagery to create a deeply personal account of his experience.
Pathway Trace
Almost three decades after the breakup of Yugoslavia and the bloody Bosnian war, I aimed to challenge or reaffirm certain perceptions I had about Serbia and permeate the filters regarding this foreign reality. In a similar vein to previous photographs I have documented in Eastern Europe, I approached this environment with a quiet mind allowing my personal experiences to shape the images I took. My curiosity lead me to explore what life is like in Serbia for a community with such historic and formative events within living memory. These personal experiences and the resulting images ruminate aspects of national identity for those documented in Serbia whilst considering issues regarding my own and the future as a citizen of the U.K as its government seeks to strengthen a divide with the European Union and its neighboring populations.
To view more of Tommy Sussex’s work please visit his website.