On choosing the narrow path

Last Sunday, I sat on a bar stool in a roomful of people and gave an artist talk for Manchester Photography Collective, where I spoke about the path my work has taken since starting as a hobbyist in 2020. I talked about how a life begins to narrow the moment you commit to something, that every decision to go deeper into one direction inevitably pulls you further away from others. It’s something that I’ve been reflecting on since.

I’ve chosen to tie my photography closely to CSA survivorship and trauma, and that choice comes with consequences. The road is long, the load is heavy, and the response from the outside world is often quiet. Support tends to come from those who understand it firsthand, other CSA survivors, while much of the wider world keeps its distance. This is the nature of work that exists around social taboos. It doesn’t attract mass attention. It doesn’t sit comfortably in public discourse. It asks something of people that many would rather not give. That distance can feel like a gulf, but it is also where the work becomes necessary.

Photography, for me, has become one of the most powerful modes of expression precisely because it operates where words begin to fail. Trauma does not always exist in language. It lives in the body, in memory, in fragments that resist clean narration. There are experiences that cannot be neatly explained or logically ordered. Trying to force them into words can sometimes flatten them, or worse, distance us from them entirely.

A photograph doesn’t ask for that translation. It allows contradiction to exist in a single frame, strength and vulnerability, presence and absence, silence and expression. It captures something that sits just beneath articulation. There is also something else at play: the question of who holds the gaze. For many CSA survivors, being seen has historically meant being misrepresented, reduced, or turned into something consumable.

The act of photographing, in this context, becomes more than technical or aesthetic; it becomes structural. It shifts power. By choosing how someone is framed, how they are lit, how they are allowed to exist within the image, I’m not just taking a photograph. I’m participating in a redefinition of how survivors are seen. Not as subjects of pity. Not as statistics. Not as stories filtered through institutional language. But as people, in full.

Beyond expression and representation, the most powerful element of this work is connection. Survivors often carry a deep sense of isolation. A belief, whether conscious or not, that what they’ve experienced separates them from others in a way that cannot be bridged. That they exist outside of something shared. This is one of the most damaging legacies of abuse, not just what happened, but the quiet conviction that it happened only to you.

Photography can interrupt that. When someone sees themselves reflected, not as a stereotype, not through exploitation, but with honesty and dignity, it creates recognition. And recognition creates connection. It allows someone to think, even briefly: I am not alone in this.

Victorious Voices is built around that principle. It is not just about telling individual stories, but about placing those stories in relation to one another. Creating a space where survivors stand not in isolation, but alongside others who understand without needing explanation. The photographs become part of something larger, a network of visibility that challenges silence simply by existing.

This week, that reality became tangible in a new way. I travelled to Bilbao in Spain to take the first international portrait for the project. What stood out wasn’t just the milestone, but the context that made it possible. A connection formed over time, across distance, through shared experience, led to two people from different countries standing in the same space, speaking openly about things that once felt unspeakable.

There was no spectacle to it. No audience. Just a conversation, a camera, and a moment of trust. Connection. For all the difficulty that comes with choosing this path, the lack of engagement at times, the sense of moving against the current, it is powerful healing moments like that which make the direction clear. This is work that exists because it needs to. It is not designed to sit comfortably in the mainstream. It is designed to outlast it. To create a record that cannot be denied, and a network of voices that cannot be quietly pushed back into silence.