In the Studio with Carolyn Mendelsohn

© Thomas Duffield

In an old mill overhanging the Leeds and Liverpool canal, Carolyn Mendelsohn has created a light-filled haven. 

Her studio is located in the former Wharf St Studios, one of many dynamic arts communities and start-ups in and around Saltaire in West Yorkshire.The incredible regeneration project at Salts Mill has attracted artists and creatives looking for a vibrant community with a low cost of living. But it remains an uphill battle to keep it all alive. Wharf St Studios folded earlier this year, and Carolyn is the only artist left in the cavernous industrial space. Walking around the echoing old industrial building, still littered with bits of artists’ practices–discarded ceramics, a few desks, paint splatters– it feels eerie. “Having a studio is a luxury,” Carolyn says. “At the moment, this is perfect for me, but I’m very mindful that it’s challenging for a lot of photographers to find space to make work. Before this, I worked from home and the back of my car.” Carolyn is holding out hope that artists will return to the space, now under new ownership, but until then, she holds down the fort.

Carolyn mostly makes portraits, so the faces of her subjects surround us as she guides  me around the space. She calls her works “co-produced ”, because of the importance she sees in building a meaningful relationship with her subjects before photographing them. “Coproducing means the subject is at the centre of their own story,” she tells me. “I want them to forget about the fact that I’m making a photograph with them.” One wall of the studio is entirely made up of windows, covered in a soft gauzy fabric. The space glows with a calm, ethereal light that fuels comfortable, serious contemplation for both her and her subjects. 

Her studio space is multifunctional: as well as a  portrait studio, it’s also an editing suite, and a space to mentor emerging photographers and young people from Shipley and the surrounding area. Carolyn is a Nikon ambassador and has been working with Nikon kit since 2007. Usually shooting with the Nikon Z8 and Z9, with Z50mm 1.2s, Z85mm 1.2s, and Z24-70 2.8s lenses, her work is crisp and clean.  “I have all the equipment I could hope to have,” she says.

A copy of her 2020 book, Being Inbetween, sits on the table between us as we sit drinking herbal tea. She describes it as an autoethnographic piece – even though the work is a series of portraits of tween girls, it’s about her own memories and life. The project was exhibited around the country for years and received national news coverage and an outpouring of warmth from viewers. “Things happened because of that project for me,” she tells me. “I was working in a way that didn’t mean so much to me and this enabled me to create work that had meaning.” Carolyn still feels like she “sideways stepped into being an artist” – it was an accident, not an intention, to take on this career after training as an actor and director. The attention she got for Being Inbetween allowed her to take herself more seriously and pursue the work she really wanted to do. 

At the moment, many of her projects are especially rooted in Bradford and the community she lives in. She seems surprised when I point out how much her work feels connected to Yorkshire, but says that there is a certain “rawness” about it that she’s drawn to. “I love wildness,” she says. Born in London, Carolyn has lived in Yorkshire for decades. She’s working on the second iteration of her series Wild and Free, made for the Brontë Parsonage in Heworth and inspired by Wuthering Heights. “There’s so much joy in these works”, she tells me, showing me a series of photographs of women of all ages rambling through the rugged hills of West Yorkshire. The joy she feels making them is just as important to her, and to the work, as the joy I can see in her subjects. 

She’s also the artist-in-residence for the Born in Bradford project, which is a large-scale research study documenting Bradford’s residents over time. Carolyn works on the Age of Wonder part of the project, taking pictures of a cohort of young people every year starting from age twelve. She’s getting to know them well, which jives with her ethos of co-production. Her connection with young people is clearly profound: during the COVID-19 pandemic, she created the Through Our Lens project, which helped teach young people how to photograph their own spaces and lives. She continues to mentor young people now, and returns to them as subjects over time . 

“I always feel like I’m starting at the very beginning with everything that I do”

Recently, she’s started experimenting with large-format analog work. “It’s a privilege to have time to explore two mediums that inform each other like this,” she says. As a self-taught photographer, Carolyn always feels like she’s learning. That drive to learn and express herself honestly imbues her work with a paradoxical combination of frankness and vulnerability. Up here on the edge of the moorland, the cycle of learning and making continues, Carolyn says. “I always feel like I’m starting at the very beginning with everything that I do.”

Images taken by Thomas Duffield with Nikon’s Z7II, with Z 50mm f/1.2 and Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S lenses