Dawn Parsonage is a British photographer and archival artist whose work explores the emotional truth of photography, utilising found imagery to inform her contemporary practice, she challenges how we see, feel, and remember.

Dawn Parsonage is an award winning British photographer. archival artist and collector whose work is concerned with our relationship with, and perception of, photography. She creates contemporary photographic projects as well as working to link communities to their archives. She looks at the power the presence of the camera has, and how we can harness that power or circumnavigate it.

She has a deep interest in how real emotions can be captured in photography, as well as how photography has the power to help us re-see the familiar.

Her work is informed by her extensive archive of over 20,000 found photographs, amassed over more than 30 years. Alongside her artistic practice, she maintains an academic interest in the social and technical history of photography—examining how it shapes the images we take and influences society’s visual culture. Curated selections from her archive often feature in her contemporary work, while also informing her own photographic output.

Her debut solo exhibition, The Boring Exhibition, featured Boring People—a striking series of 21 portraits of individuals intentionally brought to a state of boredom through experiments co-developed with psychologists. The Boring Book, published as part of the project, is held in the libraries of the Royal Photographic Society and the Martin Parr Foundation.

In 2025, she was commissioned to produce a town-wide public installation of photographs in Barrow-in-Furness, UK. In 2024, she exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen as part of The Irreplaceable Human. Her work has been recognized by the Aesthetica Art Directory (2021), Fix Photo Festival (Judge’s Choice, 2020), and LensCulture Black and White Awards (Finalist, 2019), and has been widely published.

Her commission Here and There, exhibited as part of Departures at the Migration Museum in London, captured a moving series of portraits of individuals emigrating from the UK.

She works from her studio in St Leonards-on-Sea as part of the artist collective Picnic-on-Sea.

“The major theme of my collection is instances of real emotion—people laughing, crying, falling in love, doing all the things that make us universally human.

These moments are fragile and fleeting; they often vanish the moment we try to capture them. When a camera appears, we self-regulate—we become conscious of how we look, what we’re doing, how we feel. Genuine emotion on film is rare. That’s why images of people in boredom, like those in *The Boring Exhibition*, strike me as a raw and unfiltered form of intimacy.”

Email: dawn@lightspacecolor.com

EXHIBITIONS

Solo shows

2025 The Workers - Commission for Signal Film Media, exhibited in the streets of Barrow-in-Furness, UK

2023 Unfamiliar - Work in Progress - Picnic on Sea.

2019 Boring Exhibition - Bermondsey Project Space, London.

Group shows

2023-24 The Irreplaceable Human - Louisiana Museum of Modern art, Copenhagen

2020-21 Departures - Migration Museum, London.

2019 PUSH, Brightrooms. Peckham Levels.

2018 D.I. - direct input - Muddy Yard, British Columbia, Canada.

2018 The Great Divide - OVADA, Oxford, UK