Ilkley Camera Club members, led by Mark Waddington, one of the founding members of photoILKLEY, were invited to share their own perspectives on this year’s festival theme, HUMAN:NATURE.

Presented in response to this year’s festival theme, HUMAN:NATURE, The Good River is Benjamin Statham’s quiet, deeply personal journey along the River Wharfe — a meditation on place, identity, and the shifting relationship between the human body, the land, and the self.

A Thousand Cuts is a photographic project by Sujata Setia, shaped through conversations with South Asian women who have experienced domestic abuse. Part of photoILKLEY’s HUMAN:NATURE festival theme, the work takes its title and starting point from Lingchi, using the idea of repeated cutting as a way to think about the slow, cumulative harm of abuse within the home. Each portrait is printed on thin paper and cut by hand, suggesting both fragility and endurance. The red beneath the surface speaks of pain, but also of survival and the possibility of change.

In response to HUMAN : NATURE, Zoe explores the landscapes that shape identity: personal, inherited and cultural. Combining found photographs from her father’s Afghanistan with images of Manchester, White Passing traces connections between place, memory, migration and belonging, incorporating extracts from a longer text by the artist.

Portraits of Our Time began as a personal project in the artist’s mother’s care home. Responding to the theme HUMAN:NATURE, it reflects on the human need to be seen, remembered and understood.

Each person was photographed holding an object that mattered to them: a photograph, keepsake, or everyday item. These objects became quiet openings into memory, identity and the stories that shape a life.

Developed with Bradford Care Association, the project grew across care settings, sparking conversations between residents, families, carers and visitors. The final series of 66 portraits is on display at Bradford Industrial Museum.

OTB’s photography groups, made up of adults with learning disabilities, were invited to respond to this year’s theme, HUMAN:NATURE, by sharing their own perspectives on Ilkley — noticing everyday beauty, connection, place and belonging through the camera lens.

In response to HUMAN:NATURE, This Land of Mine explores the relationship between memory, migration and landscape. Moving through the English countryside as an immigrant, Andreea Chițan carries fragments of home into unfamiliar terrain. Reworking the family album, she places past and present in dialogue, asking how belonging is formed. The series reflects on displacement, re-rooting and the human need to make a home within the natural world.

Included in photoILKLEY 2026 as part of this year’s theme, HUMAN : NATURE, Oluwakemi Oluwunmi’s ongoing project Home Is Where You Are reflects on human journeys, belonging and the emotional landscapes we carry within us.

The work considers movement from one place to another, across visible and invisible borders, and asks what it means to feel at home. Here, home is not simply a geographical location or a fixed physical place. It becomes a state of connection, memory and care — a feeling shaped by people, presence and shared experience.

Through this project, Oluwunmi explores the quiet moments when belonging is recognised: when the mind finds rest, joy, peace and love, even briefly. Each person carries their own story, hopes, struggles and small victories. Together, these experiences form a tender reflection on how we find place and space in the world, and how we may come to say: home is where you are.

Where Life Begins by visual artist Tracy McIlhatton is a documentary exploration of pregnancy and birth, closely connected to this year’s theme HUMAN:NATURE. The work reflects on birth as an elemental relationship between body, life and the natural world. Rather than idealising the experience, McIlhatton focuses on strength, vulnerability, waiting, uncertainty and transformation, revealing birth as both deeply human and profoundly natural: a process of bodies, connection and change.

Calculated Glitter by artist Sarah-Lee Evans responds to HUMAN : NATURE by looking beyond sequins, feathers and spray tans to the discipline beneath. Through portraits of freestyle disco dancers aged 3 to 18, the work reveals confidence, resilience, ambition and belonging. Behind the glitter, they mean business.

A showcase of shortlisted entries from our Young Photographer Competition, celebrating the creativity and vision of emerging talent.

Xanthe Hutchinson’s work speaks directly to HUMAN:NATURE, this year's theme for photoILKLEY. In photographing the transition of her teenage son, Lee, she stays close to the uncertain spaces of change: where things are emerging, still forming, not yet settled.

The series was made at a time when trans children in Britain were being pulled into public argument with extraordinary hostility, following Brianna Ghey’s murder and the closure of the Tavistock Centre. Against that backdrop, these photographs feel intimate rather than declarative. They do not try to explain Lee from the outside. They ask us instead to pay attention: to his presence, to his experience, and to the care with which he is seen.

In response to this year’s theme, HUMAN:NATURE, Charlie Swinbourne presents a series of portraits capturing the creativity, energy, and individuality of creative people. Each image explores human presence, expression, and imagination.