Josh Huxham (b. 1996) is a photographic artist based in Plymouth, UK. His work explores grief, trauma, memory, and the fragile tension between what is remembered and what is lost. Drawing on the psychological and material properties of photography, he approaches the archive as both evidence and wound: a site where absence becomes visible and the past remains active within the present.
His graduate project, SILENCE (2017), reworked family photographs through reprinting, distressing, and reconstruction. Rooted in personal experience, the series transformed the family archive into a fractured space where suppressed histories could surface. Through acts of material intervention, the work sought not to restore the past, but to confront its lingering presence.
In METANOIA (2018), Huxham turned his attention to photography’s material foundations. Through experimental processes and reconstructed surfaces, images were destabilised and remade, challenging assumptions about perception, truth, and photographic certainty. The work explored how meaning emerges not only from what photographs depict, but from the conditions through which they are produced and experienced.
His most recent series, CONVERSATIONS WITH LIGHT (2025), returns to the archive through the photographic slides of his late grandfather. By scanning, rephotographing, and reimagining these fragile transparencies, Huxham enters into a dialogue across generations, tracing an inherited way of seeing while reflecting on memory, loss, and the impossibility of fully knowing those who came before us. In doing so, the work holds presence and disappearance in quiet tension.
Across his practice, photography becomes a process of return, transformation, and repair. Through reconstruction, fragmentation, and material intervention, Huxham creates spaces where memory can be revisited, unsettled, and reimagined, allowing photographs to function not as fixed records, but as living sites of encounter between past and present.
