Gabrielle Motola is an artist, writer, and educator working at the intersection of photography, psychology, and lived encounter.

Her practice lives in intimacy, identity, vulnerability, and the ethics of relating. Using reality not as record but as material, she moves between portraiture, street, and landscape to explore what is constructed between subject and viewer. Drawing on a background in psychology and a decade working as an editor and colourist in cinema, she approaches faces, streets, and landscapes as sites of emotional inquiry. Her work occupies a space between documentary and fine art, where meaning is negotiated rather than delivered.

Living in Iceland for three years led to her first book, An Equal Difference (2016), an ethnographic exploration of gender, crisis, and cultural resilience in post-2008 Icelandic society. Combining portraiture, interviews, and reflective writing, the book began as a portrait commission and grew into something more persistent: an inquiry into how environment shapes behaviour, belief, and the stories we inherit about ourselves.

Her second book, Elūl (2025), turns the lens inward. It examines perception, attachment, and the space between seeing and projection – what we recognise in another person and what we bring to that recognition ourselves. Shown at Photo London in the Photobook Club Collective's showcase at the fair's tenth-anniversary edition, Elūl marks a shift from the sociological to the personal, while continuing to ask the same underlying question: how do the structures around us and within us shape the way we see and are seen?

A central strand of her work is street portraiture. This began with A Fear of People, a personal project born from the need to confront her own social anxiety. Rather than theorise about connection, she walked out and made it: approaching strangers, making portraits, sitting with the discomfort until it became something else. That practice evolved into her "Exposure Therapy" workshops, which use street portraiture to work with fear, build confidence, and stay present in the encounter. Her postgraduate qualifications in counselling and therapeutic photography from Robert Gordon University ground this work in method, but the workshops themselves are rooted in something simpler: the belief that showing up, repeatedly, changes what you allow yourself to feel, and enriches your life omnidirectionally.

A former AOP Board Member and Co-Chair of AOP F22, she continues to advocate for inclusion, equity, and sustainable practice across the photographic industry. She is a co-director and senior member of the Photobook Club Collective, where she mentors photographers navigating self-publishing and contributes to a community built on the principle that publishing should be empowered, sustainable, and within reach.

Her current research addresses a gap that has received little sustained attention in photography: the absence of dedicated, practice-grounded guidance on editioning, provenance, and how photographic art circulates and accrues value, with the aim of strengthening trust and sustainability across the ecosystem of artists, galleries, collectors, and institutions.

Awards

2023 AOP Photography Awards: Portraiture Gold 2023 • Women Street Photographers 2023 • Portrait of Humanity2022 • Portrait of Britain 2022 • Head On Photo Festival 2022 • RPS IPE 164 Shortlisted 2022 • KLPA Awards 2022 • Women Street Photographers 2021 • Portrait of Britain 2021 • RPS IPE 163 Shortlisted 2021 • Julia Margaret Cameron Awards 2021 • Lucie Foundation Award 2020 • Equal Lens “Two Metres of Separation” 2020 • AOP Photography Awards 2019 • AOP Photography Awards 2018 • Taylor Wessing National Portrait Prize Shortlist 2014

Publications

Amateur Photographer - Peter Dench Reviews Elūl - February 2026
Royal Photographic Society - Photographing The Invisible- 2024
Photowalk Podcast Interviews 2020 - 2024
Soul of Street Issue 49 Feature Interview 2023
Capturing Emotive Portraits with the Sigma fpL
Tea & Water Talks 2021
JC Candanedo- A World That Others Can’t See 2020
Stranger Curiosity Podcast 2019 (Creator and Host)
Portraits of Strangers - Sean Tucker 2019
Henge to Henge - The Guardian 2018