Francis Augusto

"...portraits that explore themes of representation and the spaces that spark change."
— Diane Smyth, British Journal of Photography

I'm a documentary and socially engaged artist working across photography, film, oral history and creative health. The question underneath the work is about selfhood: how people make a self, and what it costs to hold onto one when the place around you keeps changing.

I work primarily with medium-format film, and the slowness is the method. It buys the time the work depends on: conversations before the camera, oral history interviews, sessions shaped with the people I'm photographing, so they have a say in how their own story gets told. I think of them as co-authors, not subjects.

My background is in the social sciences, and I spent years as a youth worker. That left me with a habit I have never lost: looking at a personal story and asking what larger forces produced it. Whether I'm with carers in Wandsworth, young people in Mitcham, or researchers in Oxford, I'm doing one thing. Slowing down enough to actually see someone, then finding the form that lets a stranger see them too.

A few recent projects. What Settles in the Light (2025), commissioned by the Bodleian Libraries and British Journal of Photography: I photographed 13 of Oxford's researchers and change-makers for portraits now held in a collection that runs back roughly a thousand years. Ghost Notes (2024–25), for FORMAT Festival and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, used portraits and sound to follow punk across generations in Derby. Home Ground (2026), funded by Merton Council, put young people in Mitcham behind the camera as documentarians of their own neighbourhood. And a creative health residency with Wandsworth Council (2025–26) worked with unpaid carers, where the making itself was the point: a chance to be the one cared for, rather than the one always doing the caring.

I came to the UK from Angola when I was six, as a refugee of the civil war. After that we moved a lot, place to place, school to school. You learn things from that kind of childhood. You learn to read a room fast: who belongs, who doesn't, and on what terms. That reading is still what I do, only now I do it with a camera.

I grew up working-class in South West London. My mother cleaned and cared for other people for a living, and most of what I understand about dignity, and about the quiet work that holds families together, I learned watching her. I'm a Global Majority artist, and I'm self-taught. My route in wasn't a fine art degree; it was the social sciences, years of youth work, and a long habit of paying attention to people the rest of the world tends to overlook.

None of this is separate from the work. It's why the work looks the way it does, and why I make it slowly, with the people in it rather than about them.