polly alderton

Photographer Polly Alderton hails from the United Kingdom. Her work focuses primarily on portraiture and is organised around the concept of the family album, with the maxim “Show Don’t Tell” serving as the guiding principle. Due to the fact that she was born into a lower social class than the majority of people in the UK, she has an interest in studying class.

Alderton attended the Byam Shaw School of Art as well as Central St. Martins for her education in Fine Art. She has had work published in The Sunday Times, The Observer, Invisible Britain: Portraits of Hope and Resilience, Portrait of Britain volumes 1 and 3, ID magazine, the British Journal of Photography, and the Sudetenduetsche Zeitung, amongst other publications. She was the director and producer of a short film for VSCO.

Alderton was given the Firstsite Project Bursary in 2019 so that she could continue working on her solo project, which was called Burning House. She is employed by the BBC as a stills photographer, and her most notable work there involves capturing David Attenborough for the documentary Climate Change: The Facts. Collaborating with Martin Parr on a set of idents for BBC One is one of Alderton’s more recent projects. She also has a release with Setanta Books, which is the ninth publication from a bi-monthly series that features the work of new and up-and-coming.