Born in 2000 and based in London, Stella McGarvey works across analogue photography, installation, and sculptural intervention through a practice structured by material enquiry. Developed between studio and darkroom, her photographs treat exposure as a durational procedure and printing as a site of continuation. Her work frames photography as an embodied discipline: a medium whose evidentiary claim remains inseparable from the labour of its making. Long exposure, dodging, and burning function as analytic gestures—forms of deliberate emphasis and removal that clarify how photographic meaning accrues through time, pressure, and calibration.

A sustained commitment to black-and-white photography situates McGarvey’s images in a field of tonal structure, contrast, and gradation. She notes that reducing an image to tone and contrast “forces you to look at the portrait of the person,” directing focus toward the sitter’s presence within their environment. “Being invited into someone’s workspace is a privilege,” she adds.

Alongside portrait work, McGarvey repeatedly centres objects (most frequently chairs) and lacunary gaps within the image plane: motifs that operate as stand-ins for bodies, companions, witnesses, residues, staging disappearance as a material condition.