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.

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.