Marianna Silvano, Kingston upon Thames, 2025.
Outer Capital is an exhibition selected from images made by a collaborative photography project by Vicinity, a collective of ten documentary photographers based in London with both local and international roots. Vicinity came together organically - through photographic institutions and venues across the city and turned those encounters into a long-term collaboration: monthly walks, each dedicated to one of the twenty Outer London boroughs which were created when the London Government Act of 1963 redrew the capital's map producing a new boundary that has shaped the city ever since. Over 60% of the population of Greater London lives within the Outer Boroughs, which provide 42% of the total employment within the Capital.
Over two years, Vicinity worked their way through all these boroughs, photographing high streets, shopping centres, car parks, markets, estates and parks. Each walk drew on the group's differing practices and perspectives, building a collective portrait of places rarely pictured in our shared idea of London.
The resulting photographs hold ordinary routines, chance encounters, odd details, fleeting moments - the contrasts and continuities of life beyond the centre. Outer London is often treated as peripheral, yet it is essential to the capital's identity: twenty boroughs, each with its own rhythm, character and community, together forming as much of London as anything within the old county boundary. Outer Capital treats that diversity as the subject, rather than the backdrop.
This exhibition is staged as a journey through these places. Visitors can follow the group’s routes, take detours, and find lesser-known corners and unexpected details along the way. There is no prescribed path, only room for curiosity and chance, echoing the walks themselves.
Exhibiting photographers: Wei Jian Chan, Sally Itani, Chanelle Joseph, Amir Lodge, Sergey Novikov, Sophie Polyviou, Nick Sheridan, Anya Shilonos, Marianna Silvano, Miguel Souto, Ed Taylor
Curator: Katy Barron
Sophie Polyviou
Foxtrot Lightning is the name for creative projects by Sophie Polyviou - a London-based visual artist, originally from Cyprus and forever drawn back to the sea. Guided by wonder and intuition, her photography explores everyday topographies and the human relationship to our environment in a time of increasing disconnection. Using photography as both documentation and raw material to produce self-published zines and tactile prints, images are often run through a mill of digital & physical manipulation. Introducing elements of texture and mutation which begin to echo natural patterns, her work aims to channel the true strangeness and enduring mystery of our world. Her photographs have been exhibited with Nunnery Gallery; Shutter Hub; and featured in Edition 365 by the British Journal of Photography. Her zines have been stocked at the Photographer’s Gallery, London; Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; & The Blank Gallery, Tokyo, amongst others.
@foxtrotlightning https://foxtrotlightning.com/
Wei Jian Chan
Wei Jian Chan (b.1991) is a Singaporean-born photographer based in London, whose work seeks to find beauty in the chaos of modern life.
Working primarily in black-and-white, Wei Jian utilises both traditional wet darkroom processes and modern digital techniques in his work. His work frequently incorporates elements of geometry, architecture, and motion.
Wei Jian’s debut photobook ‘Journey to the West’ was published by Setanta Books in 2025. His photography has been exhibited in various locations in the UK and Europe, and has been acquired to form part of the permanent collection of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Art.
@theweijian https://www.weijianchan.com/
Marianna Silvano
Marianna Silvano is a self-taught photographer from Southern Italy based in London, working primarily in documentary analogue photography. Her practice is an exercise in presence and connection, rooted in her commitment to documenting the many textures of culture woven into everyday life. Through experimenting with developing techniques, different emulsions, and printing methods, she investigates the facets of personal perception, interrogating the tension between individual and collective, isolation and belonging.
@marianna_silvano https://mariannasilvano.myportfolio.com/
Chanelle Joseph
Chanelle Joseph is a photographer and creative producer based in London. Her work is rooted in diasporic stories, movement and connection, exploring the relationship between people, culture, music and place.
Her photography has grown through books, conversations with photographers and experimenting with cameras. Working across analogue, digital and moving image, Chanelle is drawn to the character, rhythm and spontaneity that can emerge when people and their surroundings come together.
Soursop Studio takes its name from the fruit, grown across Africa, the Caribbean and parts of Asia. It reflects her interest in diasporic movement and the stories of people who have made a home away from home.
@soursopstudio http://www.soursopstudio.com/
Nick Sheridan
Although London-born, Nick has lived in many other parts of the UK and abroad — in Prague, where his parents lived and his brothers were born — the Vicinity Hub project felt to him like taking "20 different vacations over around a two-year period," given how very different the Outer Capital Boroughs were compared to "home." In his words: "I used varied cameras and recording means — sometimes infra-red, sometimes old-school analogue, or old-school digital (CCD rather than CMOS sensors) — to convey the varied subjective experiences of sitting at the outer fringes of 'reality.' This is the second time I've exhibited as part of a collective this year at Photofusion, and I hope to continue charting the remaining inner 12 London Boroughs to complete what feels like an unfinished project, and present a solo exhibition in 2027."
@nicksheridan32
Miguel Souto
Miguel Souto is a Spanish photographer and designer based in London. Working closely with architects and interior designers, he photographs and documents architectural and interior projects. His work has been published internationally in print and digital media. His personal practice explores urban environments and landscapes shaped by human activity, with a focus on spatial relationships and the ways people inhabit and experience their surroundings. Through both photography and design, he investigates form, materiality and the connections between people, objects and spaces, exploring the emotions these relationships evoke.
@miguelsouto.photo miguelsouto.com
Sally Itani
Sally Itani is an architect, urban researcher, and self-taught photographer from Lebanon, currently based in London. Growing up between Beirut and London, her work explores notions of home and identity — how people and communities express and construct their identities through the spaces they inhabit, and how in turn those spaces shape the identities formed within them. She is especially drawn to the urban space as inherently political, using photography as a tool of inquiry to observe patterns of segregation and assimilation often visible through the minute details of everyday life. Sally also leads walking tours that trace the connections between cities, inequality, and social justice.
@sallyitani https://www.sallyitani.com/
Anya Shilonos
Anya Shilonos (she/they) is a queer documentary photographer and a multidisciplinary artist.
Anya was born in Leningrad, raised in St.-Petersburg and now lives in London, UK. She considers herself a renaissance person and has a few trades under her belt. They have been working as a photographer since 2007. Anya prefers to work on long-term projects, taking their time to observe the subject(s). Among her interests are: humans’ interaction with the cityscape, transgenerational trauma and how it unfolds in new times, social activism, and lived experiences of parenthood.
@anya.shilonos shilonos.art
Sergey Novikov
Photographic artist, born in Russia. My long-term photography projects center on the studying of the economy and culture of territories and societies and the mechanisms by which they function.
Photobooks were shortlisted for the BOPFOLIO Bristol 2024, Images Vevey Dummy Award 2019, 2021, the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles 2016, 2017, the Photobookfest Moscow Dummy Award 2017, 2018, the Anamorphosis Prize 2016.
My work is held in institutional and private collections including MAMM, The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography; MOMA and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art libraries. velvia25 https://sergeynovikov.com/ Ed Taylor Recently relocated (and now Leicester-based). Lemonade maker of 15 years, full-time industrious letterpress printer, and, often, a photographer. I enjoy diving deep into process and community.
@print98.exe hairball.co.uk