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Make Yourself at Home Stories from Bradford
13 September to 20 December 2025
Bridging past and present, Make Yourself at Home weaves together newly commissioned photography with rich archival material to present a vibrant portrait of life in Bradford. The exhibition reflects on Bradford’s dynamic cultural landscape and celebrates the enduring communities at its heart.
At its centre are five new photography commissions offering a contemporary portrait of the district. Starting with the idea of ‘family,’ each photographer set out to discover markets alive with conversation, homes full of stories, and communities rooted in shared experience.
Laura Mate’s series A Fair Trade captures the vibrancy of local markets. Tori Ferenc’s Sěmьja draws on her Polish heritage, visiting Eastern European social clubs still alive with music, laughter, and memory. In From Hope, From Bradford, Anselm Ebulue meets people in chance encounters, photographing them against the district’s diverse and iconic backdrops. Nathan McGill’s Home Grown celebrates green spaces where asylum seekers and refugees plant, grow, and connect. While, Karol Wyszynski’s Under One Roof introduces eight families, and explores how family members share space and shape each other’s lives.
Accompanying the newly made photographs is Bradford Family Album, an extensive community-sourced archive of family photographs. Built through months of dedicated community outreach, the archive brings together personal photographs from households, families, and community hubs across the Bradford district.
From wide-lapelled 1970s wedding celebrations to garage-smoked Latvian meats, the photographs capture personal milestones, cultural traditions, and everyday moments of connection. This living archive is a collective record of how people have preserved heritage, adapted customs, and shaped new ones in the process of making Bradford their home.
The photographs and accounts collected ensure that these fragments of personal history are safeguarded for future generations. This living archive will continue to grow, and the photographs collected so far are the beginning of this journey.
These two strands come together to reveal how personal histories inform our present and shape our sense of belonging. Make Yourself at Home is a celebration of lives and legacies passed on. It stands as a testament to the power of Bradford’s people to shape identity, preserve culture, and create a home.
The exhibition, Make Yourself at Home and digital archive, Bradford Family Album, have been developed by New Focus: Bradford Young Curators, Impressions Gallery’s young people’s collective. The project is the result of 18 months of collaboration, mentorship, research, and community engagement. Working closely with the team at Impressions, the Young Curators have been involved in every stage of the process: from selecting artists and working with local communities, to developing a website and producing an archive. Together, they have crafted an exhibition that blends personal experience with collective memory, celebrating identity, belonging, and what it means to call a place home.
Curated and produced by Impressions Gallery and New Focus: Bradford Young Curators. Commissioned by Bradford 2025.