About Us
FotoDocument is an award-winning arts social enterprise, which brings visibility to positive social and environmental initiatives around the world through documentary photography, film, and multi-media products and installations. The work creates significant impact through fostering a profound sense of active global citizenship by engaging participants and audiences in powerful storylines, which spark meaningful change.
What we offer
Our FotoStory service works with a diverse range of companies, NGOs, and public institutions to create and curate solution-focused visual stories that inspire and engage audiences, clients and stakeholders, and which culminate in online, printed and physical exhibitions with an extensive reach.
Our FotoSchool service creates cutting-edge educational resources and delivers innovative photography workshops teaching visual literacy and practical photography skills within schools, colleges, companies, NGOs and public sector institutions, with a focus on inspiring and engaging disadvantaged communities.
We facilitate the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award, an international women’s documentary photography award, supported by Nikon UK and granted annually to a professional female photographer towards the completion of a compelling photo essay, which addresses an important under-reported and solution-focused social or environmental issue.
Our FotoAgency provides world-class portrait, event, documentary, product, sport, fashion & architectural photography & video from our range of industry specialists at reasonable rates. Profits are reinvested to fund FotoDocument’s arts education work.
Who we are
Nina Emett
Nina Emett is founding Director of FotoDocument. She is a passionate believer in visual story-telling to engage people in powerful narratives, creating active global citizenship to effect positive change. She has commissioned and curated over 30 multi-media arts projects and exhibitions since 2012. She won a PEA (People Environment Achievement) Award for FotoDocument’s acclaimed ‘One Planet City’ environmental project with Bioregional in 2015. She has worked as a photographer widely including for The Independent, Amnesty International, PwC, Brighton & Hove City Council and works on her own long-form documentary photo essays. Nina was Strategic Lead for Brighton & Hove City Council’s anti-racism strategy (2005-09) and Director of Salusbury World Refugee Centre (1999–03). She holds a Level 3 Teaching qualification, an MSC in International Development, a Postgraduate Diploma in Photojournalism & a BA Hons in French.
Lucy Bryson
Lucy Bryson has been a Non-Executive Director of FotoDocument since January 2013. Lucy has always worked in the voluntary and public sector on issues related to the protection and integration of refugees and other vulnerable migrant groups in the UK. She spent ten years at the Refugee Council in London and Leeds where she helped resettle households fleeing Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s and managed a team of advisors for unaccompanied children seeking asylum. She has been working at Brighton & Hove City Council since 2003 in a policy role advising on the city’s response to international migration. Lucy brings considerable experience in management, policy and strategy to FotoDocument as well as a focus on BME and marginalised communities. Lucy has been recognised as a Community Hero by the University of Sussex.
Simon Roberts
Simon Roberts (b.1974) is a British artist-photographer whose work deals with our relationship to landscape and notions of identity and belonging. He has published and exhibited widely and his photographs reside in major public and private collections, including the George Eastman House, Deutsche Börse Art Collection and V&A Collection. In 2010 he was commissioned as the official British Election Artist by the House of Commons Works of Art Committee to produce a record of the General Election on behalf of the UK Parliamentary Art Collection; and in 2013 was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. He has published four critically acclaimed monographs, Motherland (Chris Boot, 2007), We English (Chris Boot, 2009), Pierdom (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2013) and most recently Merrie Albion (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2017).
Toby Buckle
Toby Buckle works with organisations across the UK and internationally helping to develop resilient and resourceful and effective leaders. Toby is a certified trainer of NLP with a Bsc Hons in Management Science (UMIST). His background gives him insight into the private, public sectors and charity and social enterprise. Toby spent ten highly successful years in management and director positions and combines hands on experience with the best of theory and advanced coaching skills. Toby has a way of helping you see things from a new perspective and looks to the heart of issues in order to produce results. He makes the exploration of emotional intelligence enjoyable and enlightening.
Donna Decesare
Donna De Cesare is an author, documentary photographer and educator known for her groundbreaking coverage of the spread of US gangs in Central America. She is an Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a consultant to the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University and a Master Teacher with the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation for Latin American Journalism. She has received many prestigious awards including Maria Moors Cabot Award, Pictures of the Year International, National Press Photographers Association, the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize, the Mother Jones Award for Social Documentary Photography. Her photography has been exhibited internationally in venues such as Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, France; Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City; the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China among many others.
Neo Ntsoma
Neo Ntsoma is an award winning photographer, educator and consultant whose photos have appeared in renowned newspapers, magazines and books as well as exhibitions worldwide. In 2004, Ntsoma became the first female recipient of the Mohamed Amin Award, the CNN African Journalist of the Year Photography Prize. Ntsoma is also the recipient of the National Geographic All Roads Photography Award and the co-author of ‘Women by Women’, a book on 50 years of women’s photography in South Africa commissioned by the Department of Arts and Culture and published by Wits University Press. In 2006, she was named one of the ‘100 Most Influential Women’ by Africa’s largest media group, Media24, and in both 2004 and 2006 Cosmopolitan magazine included her in their top thirty “Awesome Women” list. In 2019, she was featured in the Mail & Guardian bulletin of Top 100 Women Changing South Africa.
Andrea Bruce
Cesar da Luz
César Santos da Luz is an artist researcher and community organiser, an experienced community arts facilitator & reflective practitioner. He was awarded an MA from the University of Brighton in Photography. His artistic practice interrogates the role of photography in relation to memory, diaspora and family stories. He uses found photographs and family’s photographic archives as mnemonic reminders that activate, imagine and reinvent, individual and collective memory, strengthening the link between present and past. As both European and African, his work is intended to confront issues of erasure and cultural negotiation. Self-narratives that pose questions anchored in problematics around migration and diaspora. He has a Level 3 Teaching qualification.
Poppy Berry
Poppy Berry is a portrait photographer although she covers an assortment of subjects. For over 15 years she has worked as a commercial photographer. Clients include The Times, Observer, Guardian, Washington Post, FT and Scotsman, Design and Advertising agencies, BBC Magazines, Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette, and Orion Publishing. Among corporate clients are JPMorgan & Citibank. Her subjects range from actors, writers, artists and bankers to landscapes, interiors and farmers, not forgetting children and the odd animal. She has a Level 3 Teaching qualification.
Francesca Moore
Francesca Moore is a freelance photographer whose personal work stems from interests in people and the environment. With an MSc in Biological Photography and Imaging, Francesca draws on her scientific background to portray humanitarian, social and environmental issues. Past projects include a documentary project on the effect of EU legislation on traditional Romanian subsistence farmers at the point of Romania joining the EU. Francesca is currently working on the Arts Council funded project Bhopal: Facing 30, that portrays the site of the 1984 Bhopal disaster today, and of the people that continue to be affected 30 years on. Francesca has a Level 3 Teaching qualification.
Caroline Cortizo
Caroline Cortizo has worked with award winning photographers and major photography publishing companies for over 16 years before founding Shifting Pixels. Within post production she has a great track record of efficiency, delivering projects on budget and on brief; the key to her success is to listen to customers and work hand in hand to deliver their vision. During the course of her career she has also become a truly knowledgable and professional archivist with expertise in all areas of digital and film management. Within publishing Caroline is the go-to person for CMYK profiling helping photographers and publishers alike.
Samantha Beckett
Samantha Beckett BA studied her Photography Bachelor’s degree at Westminster University and had a successful career working for top flight advertising photographers before founding Shifting Pixels. Samantha understands the needs of the photographer and the demands of the industry to always deliver meticulous post production no matter the budget whilst providing a great service. She is also specialist in exhibition print management having produced shows for high profile photographers including Tim Flach, Linda McCartney and Mary McCartney both nationally and internationally; she is highly regarded for her quality control and eye for detail.
Chris Cousins
Chris Cousins is an award-winning, multi-disciplined designer for print, digital and broadcast. With a background in print and editorial design for several national newspapers, Chris branched out in 2006, using his skills as a 3D artist to enter the expanding digital realm. As a designer of live visuals he has worked with major artists such as Elton John, Queen, The Rolling Stones, Fat Boy Slim and ACDC, and for clients such as BlackBerry, Nokia, BP, Disney and Virgin. Chris has ventured into the wider areas of film production, as an on-set vfx supervisor, technical director and post-production specialist. He currently freelances and collaborates internationally from sunny Brighton.