Gabrielle Motola is an artist, writer, and advisor.

She grew up between the United States and Canada, changing schools every two or three years, and has since lived and worked in France, the United Kingdom, and Iceland. She speaks French, Icelandic, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese in varying registers, and is interested in what each language carries and refuses to carry; the thoughts you can have in one that you cannot have in another. Countries shape how their people think, act, and see, often in ways those people cannot perceive from inside, and yet each of us is also larger than the country that formed us. Underneath all of it is a sustained attention to how people understand and are understood by each other.

Her portrait practice examines intimacy, identity, and the ethics of relating, shaped by a background in psychology, a decade as an editor and colourist in cinema, and postgraduate training in counselling and therapeutic photography.

She has published two books. An Equal Difference (2016) was made over two years in Iceland in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, pairing portraits with interviews and her own writing to ask how a small society renegotiated gender, work, and trust. Elūl (2025), a hand-bound first edition of 100, looks inward: at perception, attachment, and the assumptions people carry into love. She is a co-director of the Photobook Club Collective, through which she exhibits at international art and photobook fairs and supports independent publishing across the photographic community.

Alongside her creative practice, she works with artists on the business of being an artist: editioning, provenance, pricing, and the structures through which a body of work is sold, archived, and inherited. Her concern, across the advisory work, the writing, the teaching, and the collective, is the same one that runs through her photographs: how artists contribute to our understanding and appreciation of the self, to our exploration of the world, and to the different aspects of ourselves we might otherwise not meet.

She believes you are never too small to start giving back and runs a bursary fund that makes her advisory services and workshops accessible to people who could not otherwise afford them, supported by her Patreon community and direct contributions. Artists are an essential part of the wider cultural ecosystem, and their work is stronger and their contributions more sustainable when artists hold real agency over both the integrity of what they make and the means of sustaining it.

That ecosystem is built and held by many hands. Collectors, galleries, dealers, museums and auction houses are its stewards, and the artists who learn to meet them well contribute to a system that serves everyone in it. She has come to understand, across years of conversation with people on every side of the work, that collecting is its own act of discovery; that the collector who builds a body of work over a lifetime is engaged in something close in shape to what the artist does in making it, a sustained inquiry into who they are and how they navigate the human experience.

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 - ‘Eye Contact’ March 2026
Amateur Photographer - ‘The Hardest Part of Making a Photobook’
Amateur Photographer - A Review of Elūl by Peter Dench 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 Sigma 2023
Tea & Water Talks 2021
JC Candanedo- A World That Others Can’t See 2020
Portraits of Strangers - Sean Tucker 2019
Henge to Henge- The Guardian 2018