MySide: A Kind of Stillness
October 11th, 2025 | MySideThis is the time of year when everything seems to pause. The days narrow, light turns low, and the air feels full of waiting. These photographs live in that pause. Each image holds a story, though none of them speak loudly instead they explore a kind of stillness that carries weight. These pictures remind us that silence, too, can hold emotion and that landscape can say what words often cannot.
The photographers come from different places, yet there is something shared in how they look. Each pays attention to what is fleeting and together their work suggests that stillness is not an absence, but a way of seeing, a space where memory and time meet.
These images were selected from MySide, our open call inviting people everywhere to show life from their own point of view. Through MySide, we are building a growing archive of how we see, remember and belong to the world around us.
Kip Harris: Idaho Potato Field in December, 2023
"I grew up in a small farming town in Idaho. Each fall school closed for two weeks for “spud harvest.” I started picking potatoes when I was probably 10 years old. I returned to Idaho in the early winter of 2023 to place the ashes of my sister in the Snake River. I drove out into the country and it started to snow. I was reminded of the final lines of James Joyce’s “The Dead”: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead"."
Maria Gabriela Portaluppi Cervantes: A photo album for my grandmother, 2009
"Until 2012, my grandmother lived in Rio Verde, a town three hours from Esmeraldas, Ecuador, which she had to leave due to a series of cattle thefts in the area. She moved to the capital at the age of 82, and my grandmother felt strange in the city. That's how I came up with the idea of creating an album for my grandmother. But I don't just want to give her some photos; I want to give her an experience, so that when she looks at them, they evoke the feeling of that time when she was a child and when we traveled every July to spend our vacations with her."
Matt Marshall: In My Own Wickedness, 2025
"This is an image from the project "Dystopia" that explores Dartmoor National Park as a post-apocalyptic setting. While the overarching theme of the project is to explore militarised landscapes and ecological memory, this particular shot of a lonely tree is set up to represent the side of the human mind that has been taken over by melancholy. It is an expression of mental health, sifting through the emotions I carry and learning how to express them creatively."
Keith Thompson: A New Dawn, 2022
"I have always been drawn to North Shields Fish Quay as my place relax, think and reflect. I was fortunate to arrive just as the sun was beginning to burn through."
Joseph Wilson: From the series 'Bound', 2020
"Ashington was once considered the world's largest coal mining village. Industrial structures, slag heaps, and pits once covered the northern area of the town. The intense sound, danger and production of industry is no more, this place is now marked by time, abandonment and reclamation. There is but one piece of structure that remains: The Butterwell Branch, part of a railway system which once connected various pits and collieries in the area. The line recalls a shared history, yet it is half forgotten. It’s slow decay is indicative of a kind of amnesia that takes place when the industry that built the town no longer exists."
Rob Knight: Kilchoan, West Ardnamurchan, 2019
"Shore Cottage in Kilchoan is a place I spend a lot of time, it carries an emotional resonance and is deeply important to the community and a hub for events all year. It’s a place that is synonymous with my deep connection to West Ardnamurchan, it’s my beacon and sentinel in my connection and association with place and ‘home’."