Eleanor Curtis freediving in the waters off Nusa Lembongan, March 2018, shortly after photographing the manta rays as printed in Into the Blue. Photography courtesy of Agustine Elejalde

Photographer

Eleanor Curtis is a photographer based in London specialising in black and white negative photography and silver gelatin printing.

Eleanor started using a camera as a teenager and mastered the art of developing and printing her own black and white 35mm photographs in the darkroom when she was 17 years old. Her ideas for photography were further enhanced when working as a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art in the early 1990s.

She left London in the mid-90s to work as a journalist and photographer in Cairo, Egypt working for a variety of UK, European and US broadsheets, journals and news agencies. She continued working from the Middle East, Africa (South Africa, Angola) and Italy between 1994 and 2001. Her list of publications include The Financial Times (Weekend), The Guardian, The Irish Times, Reuters (South Africa) and Agence France Presse. She had her first solo exhibition at The Africa Centre, central London in 1999 of her documentary photographic work in Angola.

As an author she has four books on architecture and design and as a photographer she has published two books: St George’s Chapel, A Portrait (2008) and A Book of King’s (2010) which accompanied the colour work of Magnum photographer Martin Parr. She has enjoyed solo and group exhibitions since 1999 in London, the wider UK and abroad. Her photography has featured in various journals such as Black and White Photography and The British Journal of Photography, and on BBC and CNN news television.

She uses black and white negative film (35mm, 120mm and 5 x 4). Eleanor’s recent work is focused on water and she is enjoying experimenting with a Nikonos V underwater 35mm camera and an old Nikon F90 35mm camera in Subal housing. Separately in May 2023, she returned to The College of St George at Windsor Castle with her medium format Mamiya camera to work on her second photographic documentary project of The College.

Eleanor prints her own work up to size 10″ x 8″ and has experimented with platinum/palladium printing and other alternate printing processes such as Van Dyke and Cyanotype. She continues to explore these traditional printing process as part of her portfolio on the human form.

She rarely works in colour but for the series ‘Love Is Talent’ she experimented with long exposure colour negative. ‘Love is Talent’ is a series of work inspired by her late brother and the poem of the same name by Carol-Ann Duffy.

Eleanor works closely with Bayeux in central London. Bayeux is a professional photography lab which specialises in both digital and analogue photographic print processes.

Eleanor prints on silver gelatin fibre warm tone paper. All prints are signed and are part of a limited edition of no more than 25.

For more information on Eleanor’s photography please see Q and A with Eleanor Curtis

Education/ Research Positions

BA (Hons) Psychology with Computer Models, University of Sussex

Research Fellow, Royal College of Art, London

MA (with Distinction) International and Comparative Law,  School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Research Associate, International Security, Chatham House, London

LLB, The University of Law, London