PHOTOGRAPHY

Before painting, there was photography.

Hannah Shillito's fascination with image-making began with her grandfather, Alf Markey, a press photographer whose career included working with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. His influence helped shape her early curiosity about people, performance and the extraordinary moments a camera can capture.

Trained in specialist photography at Manchester College in 2012, Hannah developed a practice spanning portraiture, fashion, documentary and travel photography. Her work has taken her across the world, from Tokyo and New York to Cape Town, Milan and the Himalayas, exploring the beauty, theatricality and unexpected poetry of everyday life.

Her photographic career has included solo exhibitions in Milan, an image projected onto a Manhattan skyscraper in New York, and a digital presentation at the Louvre in Paris as part of See Me's Exposure Award in 2015. Her photography has also featured on Vogue's PhotoVogue platform.

Photography continues to inform Hannah's multidisciplinary practice, particularly her fascination with identity, glamour, representation and the relationship between surface and meaning. The instinct to capture fleeting moments, question appearances and find beauty in the unexpected remains central to her work across painting, performance and installation.

The camera taught her to look. Everything else followed.