Philip Sinden's Journey in Contemporary Photography

Forget Me Not, a new exhibition opened last week end at a gallery in England with five prominent photographers.

The invite for Forget Me Not, an exhibition at Somerset’s CLOSE gallery, features a close-up of a rose bathed in blue light. The stark, simple image is by the photographer Philip Sinden, who has shot for titles including British Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar(and, of course, Mission), and brands including Chanel, Sony and Fendi. But his images for Forget Me Not (which also features work from photographers and artists including Anna Mossman, Mariano Vivanco, Denise Webber and Andrew Cross) reveals another side to his work, away from the glamour of the luxury industry.

Some of Sinden’s images, under the title Shot In Bow, are part of an ongoing project, photographing new models at his London studio in a conscious attempt to distance himself from over-produced fashion shoots. ‘It was a new way for me to see,’ he explains. ‘After a long time of working for fashion titles like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, I just wanted to strip everything back. And now I get commissioned to do that kind of work.’

He found it refreshing to ditch the baggage that usually accompanies such productions. ‘I think it’s that whole stripped-back idea; the models don’t really have an idea of who they are or what they are bringing to the table, what they have to offer. So it’s very different from shooting celebrities who always give you that same look, or working with a bigger team where there are lots of voices,’ he says.

“Quite often one of these new models will walk in and it might be the day after I’ve done a big shoot with a big team, and I think what the hell am I doing? Why am I in the studio with this kid? And then suddenly something will happen and you get this amazing picture.”

Working alone, or occasionally with a stylist (‘and never with hair and make-up’), there is a vulnerability and disarming vibrancy to the pictures. ‘Quite often one of these new models will walk in and it might be the day after I’ve done a big shoot with a big team, and I think what the hell am I doing? Why am I in the studio with this kid? And then suddenly something will happen and you get this amazing picture,’ says Sinden.

Without the usual entourage, Sinden marvels that a process that usually takes several hours will achieve better results ‘in 20 minutes’. This is partly because he gets to control the process without any exterior noise, but also, he remarks, because he allows the models to more fully engage in the process too.

His Flowers series naturally picks up on the title of the show, Forget Me Not, but again approaches its subject matter through a stripped-back way of working. ‘It’s very simplistic; one flower, and then I’ve added a color to it, which might reflect a mood in some way. There’s no lighting, they’re shot on large format film; there are mistakes in the processing, with the drips on the background, and all of that is left in,’ he says. ‘I think that’s something that sits very closely with the portraits: they’re not about perfection. They’re not really retouched, they’re very straightforward.’

A third series of images, Happenings, consist of photographs created exclusively with a large-format 5×4 rail camera during his international travels for commercial work. Sinden explains how, despite carefully consideration, the image often only reveals itself to him after the event. The title refers to how these photographs ‘are less concerned with documentation than with experience. They function as moments of encounter – shaped by perception, chance, and memory – where meaning is not fixed at the point of exposure, but continues to evolve through recollection and the viewer’s own act of looking.’

The show’s title, Forget Me Not, and its theme of displacement, also resonates deeply with Sinden for very different reasons. ‘I was adopted, and that’s been something that I’ve been talking more about recently, and that whole sense of displacement and loneliness and never fitting in, and all of those things are starting to play into the work a bit more,’ he says. Sinden has recently made a 40-minute documentary, A Portrait of My Parents, recording his attempts to find out about his biological family. ‘What became clear from that was I had never seen pictures of my parents, and I was searching for them and their identity – a photograph of them. And yet I’m the guy who creates lots and lots of photographs, all the time…’

The documentary – and the subsequent press exposure, including being interviewed for BBC News about the project – has meant that Sinden has had the lens turned onto himself, becoming the subject when he is more accustomed to being the faceless observer. ‘It was very interesting being in front of the camera, because I literally documented everything I was doing. And I did it with a friend of mine, Lemn Sissay, who is a poet and a writer. It’s just me and him in front of the camera a lot of the time, and then I go off on these trips to try and find my parents, filming everything in cars along the way.’

When I ask if he found them, his answer is tinged with pathos ‘Yeah… I mean I found that they had both died. But I found their children, so I have relationships with them, to some degree.’ Because his father’s side of the family are in Pakistan and his mother’s live in the Scottish Highlands, he has seen more of the latter than the former, learning to navigate these new, unexpected relationships whilst dealing with the strange sensation of seeing himself – both in terms of physical resemblance but also through mannerisms – in people who for all intents and purposes were strangers. After several successful screenings of the film, he’s now planning one in London which will be attended entirely by an audience of adopted people.

From his studio portraits to the simplicity of a single flower, Sinden’s work is shot through with this same sense of connection, of stripping away the frivolous in search of a shared identity – providing the space for individual stories to bloom.

Forget Me Not is at CLOSE, Close House, Hatch Beauchamp, Somerset TA3 6AE from 7 March – 11 April 2026. Homepage banner “Short Side Lake Diver” by Philip Sinden. Homepage “Safe to be at the window, No.1, 2019” by Denise Webber. Top inside images left, “Peonies” and right “Homage, 2018” by Mariano Vivianco.